About IRG

We are security professionals from the behavioral sciences dedicated to helping organizations prevent, detect and manage insider risk. Insider Risk Group (IRG) is the leading services provider for the Critical Pathway to Insider Risk (CPIR) analytical framework training, consultations and research and development.

 

The IRG Difference

  • CPIR methodology to prevent, detect and manage insider risks

  • Standalone or complimentary support services for insider risk programs

  • Subject matter experts with extensive risk mitigation training and consulting experience, including clinical and operational psychology expertise

  • Specialized expertise in using remote assessment, especially the use of communications to profile known and anonymous threats

  • Staffed by licensed, cleared, mental health clinicians with security, investigative, consultation, and operational psychology experience—capable of helping clients find, and then manage personnel at-risk

 

Our Team

IRG personnel include internationally recognized mental health professionals with extensive experience in government and corporate settings assisting security, law enforcement, human resource, counter-intelligence, legal and intelligence personnel. Unlike many other providers, our staff have also served as licensed clinicians and therapists and bring advanced clinical skills to the assessment and direct management of insider and other organizational challenges. Our experience as operational psychologists helps us work directly with organizational staff to improve their management of personnel challenges and provide case-based advice, and when necessary and advisable, direct intervention in these engagements. IRG staff are leaders in the fields of research and development and policy formulation to aid organizations in designing and implementing their own insider prevention, detection and management methods and policies. 

 

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Eric Shaw, PhD

Dr. Eric Shaw is the founder and CEO of IRG. He is a Clinical Psychologist and former intelligence officer who has spent the last 25 years performing consultations, training, assisting in investigations and conducting research on insider issues while helping organizations manage insider risk. He specializes in psychological profiling of insider risk using multiple methods, including content analysis of subject communications. Dr. Shaw has served as a Visiting Scientist at the Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute where he assisted CERT in understanding the individual, social and organizational psychology associated with insider risk and computer crime. He was awarded 12 patents for content analysis software designed to detect signs of insider risk from computerized communications. He has served the Department of Justice as an expert witness on insider issues involved in litigation resulting from the Anthrax attacks in 2001. Dr. Shaw’s publications on insider challenges—including his original design of the Critical Pathway to Insider Risk--and the role of behavioral science and profiling in forensic and security issues have appeared in Studies in Intelligence, Counter-Insider Threat—Research and Practice, Digital Investigation, Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and the Law, Information Security Magazine, Security Management, The Police Chief and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. His efforts were also featured in Fortune Magazine. His recent book, The Psychology of Insider Risk—Detection, Investigation and Case Management—published in July 2023, is featured under Resources, on this site. In addition to his consulting practice, Dr. Shaw served as a Professorial Lecturer in Political Psychology at the Elliot School of International Affairs of George Washington University and maintains a private clinical practice in Washington, D.C. He is certified in critical incident stress debriefing and served with the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Teams at the Pentagon after the September 11th attacks. He currently serves as an operational psychologist in federal counter-intelligence offices, as Stroz Friedberg/Aon’s chief behavioral psychologist for corporate investigations and has served as a member of the Behavioral On-Call Team for Fairfax County Police. He is a licensed psychologist in New York, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC. His other professional publications have appeared in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology and International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Dr. Shaw has personally trained over 2,500 insider risk professionals in CPIR-related analysis and has produced several analytical tools to facilitate CPIR analysis, including Pathfinder software and the CPIR-Index, designed to help analysts produce risk scores.

 

Karen E. Eberwein, PsyD

Since 2005, Dr. Karen Eberwein has utilized her psychology degree and advanced training in group and organizational dynamics to consult to decision makers, and human resource, and security components in federal and non-government organizations. In her practices, Dr. Eberwein advocates a proactive, systems approach to managing problematic behavior in the workplace. As a consultant to agency insider-threat related inquiries, Dr. Eberwein has offered insights about an individual's psychology that has helped security specialists, special investigators, and senior leaders make informed decisions about an employee's risk of engaging in harmful organizational activities (e.g. workplace violence, network sabotage, espionage, or unauthorized disclosures). In addition to assessing potentially active threats, Dr. Eberwein has provided training and guidance to agency focus groups on how to address, speak to, and manage disgruntled employees. She has also developed outreach programs targeting first line supervisors and senior leaders of employees who, if disgruntled, pose a greater threat to an organization, relative to their peers in less sensitive positions. She has worked directly with Dr. Shaw on investigations and is trained in the use of SCOUT/Cognition software. Dr. Eberwein is particularly interested in the contribution of Social Identity research on organizational risk and has presented her original work on measuring risk derived from tensions between employees and organizations to insider risk and psychology professionals.

 
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Mark F. Lenzenweger, PhD

Dr. Mark F. Lenzenweger, has worked with Dr. Shaw to develop investigative aids and risk scales based on the Critical Pathway to Insider Risk, including the Pathfinder software and the CPIR-Index. He has performed extensive research on Office of Strategic Services selection and screening programs and recently working with the FBI to re-analyze data from the Slammer investigations. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the Clinical Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Behavioral Neuroscience areas. He is also Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry (Adjunct) at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York as well as Senior Research Fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute (Weill Cornell). He is the author of nearly 150 research publications and he is the editor of 6 scholarly volumes, one of which is the field standard for theories of personality disorder. Dr. Lenzenweger brings his significant clinical and research and development skills to the IRG team where he specializes in creative approaches to screening and selection, personality and risk assessment and clinical risk management.  He maintains an independent clinical practice in Ithaca, NY and he is a licensed psychologist in New York and Massachusetts.  He has also trained hundreds of insider risk professionals on the use of the CPIR-Index through IRG certification programs.

 
 
 
 

Edward Stroz

Edward Stroz is the co-founder and CEO of Consilience 360, a cybersecurity consulting firm launched in March of 2022. Previously, Ed founded Stroz Friedberg, LLC, a renowned international digital forensics and investigations firm that pioneered cybersecurity risk management consulting and led some of the highest profile digital investigations ever conducted.  In 2016 he, his partners and investors sold the company to Aon plc.

Before starting Stroz Friedberg in 2000, Ed was an FBI Supervisory Special Agent specializing in white collar investigations. He was responsible for the formation of the first computer crime squad in the New York office. Trained as a C.P.A. and bank examiner, Ed has extensive experience in investigations of white-collar crime, including bank and securities fraud, and is often called upon as an expert witness. Ed has a special expertise in using behavioral science insights for managing insider risk.

Ed is a Trustee of Fordham University, his alma mater, and serves as an advisor to the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Crime Commission of NYC and the Board of Directors of The Soufan Center. He is a Senior Fellow with the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement at the NYU School of Law, and served on the NY State Courts System EDiscovery Working Group and has testified as an expert for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY. As a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors, in 2017 he earned the CERT Certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2021 Ed was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Fordham. He has worked directly with Dr. Shaw on investigations, development of Scout/Cognition software and other employee risk projects since they met in 1999, while employed by the U.S. Government.

 

Jacqueline Kicherer

Ms. Kicherer has worked in the insider threat industry for the past ten years, first as an intelligence analyst, and then as a project manager for a DoD insider threat program. She started working with Dr. Shaw during this time at a government insider threat program. She has managed engineering and software development teams, administered project budgets and managed client relationships. Her repertoire includes mastery of multiple project management systems including Atlassian JIRA, client updates in Atlassian Confluence, and repository management and updates in GitLab. She has extensive experience in the design of briefings and other communications materials and is relied on at IRG for her graphic design capabilities. She has experience training and supporting the full range of insider threat personnel from threat analyst to Program Directors. She has been directly involved in the training of over 2,000 insider risk professionals since 2018.