The first flag
is human.
Long before a system logs anything, people change — how they ask, what they reach for, how they show up. FirstFlag helps cleared and regulated contractors read those signals early, and build the insider threat program their contracts already require.
The amber moves first. The gap between the two is where incidents live — and where a trained person works while the tools stay quiet.
Your tools watch the network. Nobody's reading the room.
Organizations pour budget into monitoring and still miss the earliest, clearest warning — the human one. For cleared contractors the stakes aren't abstract: the mandate is real, and assessors now check whether your program actually works, not whether it exists on paper.
organizations meaningfully fold human and psycho-social signals into insider detection. The rest are watching only half the picture.
average annual cost of insider risk per organization — up from $16.2M two years earlier, and highest in regulated sectors.
requires every cleared contractor to run a functioning insider threat program. DCSA assesses whether it operates in practice.
Big enough to carry real risk. Too lean to staff a program.
FirstFlag is built for the organizations that fall through the gap — serious exposure, serious obligations, no dedicated insider threat team.
Cleared & federal contractors
Defense, IT services, and professional-services firms holding facility clearances and federal contracts. You have the NISPOM obligation and the audit exposure — but your FSO and ISSM are already stretched, and the program lives more on paper than in practice.
Fintech, credit unions & community banks
Heavily regulated, handling sensitive financial and customer data, with thin security teams and examiners who increasingly ask about insider abuse, internal controls, and separation of duties.
Three ways to work together.
Start where the need is sharpest. Each step stands on its own — and sets up the next.
Before the Breach
- A half-day session for your FSO, ISSM, managers, and security leads
- A repeatable framework for spotting behavioral precursors responsibly
- A one-page escalation playbook — who to tell, what to record, what happens next
- A 90-day action plan each attendee leaves with
Program Readiness & Gap Assessment
- 2–3 weeks: document review, stakeholder interviews, process walk-through
- Scored against recognized federal maturity standards
- A written report: current state, prioritized gaps, what each one risks
- A 12-month roadmap your team can actually execute
Program Advisory
- A monthly advisor who knows your program inside out
- Audit and DCSA-review preparation, including mock Q&A
- Manager and new-hire training, refreshed as you grow
- Quarterly policy and roadmap tuning
Workshop → "Where are our gaps?" → Assessment → "Help us fix them." → Retainer
Software tells you what already happened. I notice what hasn't reached the data yet.
Buy the best behavioral analytics on the market — you still need someone who can read people, weigh context, and stand behind a judgment call. That's the work. The tool is the easy part.
Logs are lagging indicators
By the time activity is anomalous enough to alert, the decision to act was made weeks earlier. People show it first. A platform can't sit in the room and feel it change.
Context is a human skill
The same behavior can be a crisis or a non-event depending on what's going on around it. Sorting one from the other — without overreacting or profiling — takes trained judgment, not a rule.
Assessors want judgment, documented
A functioning program means defined human review, escalation, and decisions you can defend. Tool output alone doesn't pass that bar.
Keep your tools — I make them mean something
This isn't a choice between technology and a person. Run your stack and keep me. I turn its alerts into decisions, and catch what never trips it.
Tahbia Conrad
I've spent my career on both sides of the same problem — the systems that hold an organization's secrets, and the people who can put them at risk. I started FirstFlag because most organizations have no one trained to see what I see, and the authority to act on it.
- 7+ years in cybersecurity & IT
- CompTIA Security+ certified
- Trained in behavioral analysis through graduate coursework in clinical psychology
- Consulting background advising clients on risk in system change & integration
I saw it before the system did.
At a healthcare provider, a colleague started to change. More pointed questions, less ordinary conversation. A current of anxiety under everything. And access — to systems that had nothing to do with their role.
No alert fired. No dashboard turned red. But the pattern was there for anyone trained to read it. I raised it through the right channel and offered a plan to check the systems, tighten access, and find out how it had been exposed.
That gap — between what a person can see and what a tool can see — is the whole reason this firm exists.
Find out where your program actually stands.
A 20-minute call, no pitch. Tell me where you're exposed and what your contracts require — I'll tell you honestly whether I can help and where I'd start.
Book a 20-minute call