Confront Insider Threat: Precise Anomaly Detection in Behavior Logs Based on LLM Fine-Tuning

Shuang Song, Yifei Zhang, Neng Gao


Abstract
Anomaly-based detection is effective against evolving insider threats but still suffers from low precision. Current data processing can result in information loss, and models often struggle to distinguish between benign anomalies and actual threats. Both issues hinder precise detection. To address these issues, we propose a precise anomaly detection solution for behavior logs based on Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning. By representing user behavior in natural language, we minimize information loss. We fine-tune the LLM with a user behavior pattern contrastive task for anomaly detection, using a two-stage strategy: first learning general behavior patterns, then refining with user-specific data to improve differentiation between benign anomalies and threats. We also implement a fine-grained threat tracing mechanism to provide behavior-level audit trails. To the best of our knowledge, our solution is the first to apply LLM fine-tuning in insider threat detection, achieving an F1 score of 0.8941 on the CERT v6.2 dataset, surpassing all baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.574
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8589–8601
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.574/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuang Song, Yifei Zhang, and Neng Gao. 2025. Confront Insider Threat: Precise Anomaly Detection in Behavior Logs Based on LLM Fine-Tuning. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8589–8601, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Confront Insider Threat: Precise Anomaly Detection in Behavior Logs Based on LLM Fine-Tuning (Song et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.574.pdf