Currently, security professionals, managers, investors and policy makers view insider threats as crucial problem raising diverse and manifold effects, exemplarily substantial financial and legal consequences, image damage, but also organizational consequences (e.g. new security responsibilities or positions, increasing efforts towards awareness of employees etc.). Thus, ?organizational insiders (employees and other stakeholders who have physical and/or logical access to organizational assets)? (Alfawaz et al. 2010) might cause enormous threats to an organization. Several scholars (e.g. Erlinger et al. 2009; Botta et al. 2007; Beznosov & Beznosova 2007) refer to the special need to understand the impact of organizational and human influencing factors on information security in organizations. They argue that technological factors are not the main key to ensure effectiveness of information security. Additionally, the current market downturn and possibly a difficult financial and ?emotional situation of employees and managers (e.g. fear of termination, uncertain or existence threatening situation of the employing organization etc.) may increase the potential and liability of malicious insider opportunities and acts and therefore lead to expanded organization vulnerabilities. Beside possible influences on insider behavior based on the current financial crisis, aspects of organizational culture and related management practices may play a certain role as well. Security in organizations is for example influenced by managements understanding of information security issues and executive and line managements ownership and accountability for implementing, reporting and monitoring on information security (see e.g. ISACA 2006). Based on this outlined initial situation, the present paper aims on an analysis of 1) vulnerability to organizational crisis, possible factors of success and warning indicators, 2) the role of organizational culture and management practices on employees behavior, as well as 3) related change factors with a potentially positive influence to avoid criminal insider acts.

Username
Password