History and Purpose

With the rise of classified information being released into the public domain and causing great damage to the interests and activities of U.S. and Allied forces across the world, the President of the United States signed Executive Order (EO) 13587 in 2011. The EO created a mandate that every executive level department and agency have a Counter-Insider Threat (C-InT) Program capable of deterring, detecting, and mitigating against actions by employees who present a threat to national security. The EO also established the National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF) as the government-wide means for assisting Departments and Agencies as they develop and implement their own C-InT programs. Since the signing of the EO, responses from the executive level departments and agencies across the U.S. federal government have varied. In 2017, the NITTF began partnering with the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (OUSD(I&S)) as part of an ongoing effort to bring all Departments and Agencies into compliance with the EO as well as to standardize and professionalize the C-InT workforce across the federal government.

On October 30, 2018, members of the OUSD(I&S), along with the NITTF, facilitated the first meeting of C-InT professionals from across the federal government to discuss the vision and scope of what would become the Certified Counter-Insider Threat Professional (CCITP) program. This group would eventually evolve to become the CCITP Governance Council (GC). The goal of the CCITP GC is to create a certification program that will establish workforce credibility, foster a professional identity, and catalyze professional development for C-InT professionals within the DoD and the broader U.S. government.

In 2021, leadership from DoD and the CCITP GC decided to capitalize on the success of the CCITP program and began exploring whether the CCITP certification program could be expanded to a larger audience. A feasibility study was conducted by Global Skills X-Change (GSX) under contract with The Threat Lab from The Defense Personnel and Security Research Center (PERSEREC) to identify the key similarities and differences between the two groups (the U.S. government and private industry). The study resulted in the establishment of a new essential body of work (EBW) and a new Essential Body of Knowledge (EBK), which were then validated through a Job Task Analysis (JTA) from among C-InT professionals from the U.S. government and private industry to become the foundational standards for the development of the new Global Counter Insider Threat Professional (GCITP) Program.

Throughout 2022 a new certification exam, based on results of the JTA, was developed and piloted by GSX. In late 2023 the GCITP certification program was formally launched. The GCITP is the first C-InT certification program developed for a global audience and made available to both government and private industry professionals. This effort was made possible by the partnerships between the OUSD(I&S) and the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (D-NCSC), the Threat Lab, PERSEREC, and the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland (UMD).

The DoD and NCSC will continue to jointly provide conferral authority over the CCITP program while ARLIS/UMD will serve as the conferral authority for the GCITP.