Rumor Has IT: How Fake News Damages Cyber Security
Engaging end users using marketing, psychology and safety theory.
About Geordie Stewart
His award winning masters thesis at the Royal Holloway Information Security Group examined information security awareness from a fresh perspective as a marketing and communications challenge. In his regular speaking appearances at international information security conferences such as RSA, ISACA and ISSA he challenges conventional thinking on risk culture and communication.
In addition to senior security management roles in large UK organisations Geordie writes the security awareness column for the ISSA international journal.
Awareness Blog
What the TJ Hooper Case Means for Security Awareness
For those not familiar with the case, TJ Hooper was a landmark in tort law that established an important standard for negligence. The case was heard in 1932 to assign liability for a lost cargo. A tug towing the cargo on a barge had set to sea in good weather but later that night there…
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Moral Hazard
In our efforts to promote secure behaviour, our task is often made more difficult by the fact that often the people we need to influence are often not the same people who would suffer in the event of a security breach. Typically, the people who would suffer most in the event of a breach are…
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Personas For Security Awareness
Large scale awareness programs can be challenging with so many topics to cover, so many different communication options and such varied audiences to consider. Also, your communication efforts will be competing with background noise. Every day, people are bombarded with advice. Exercise more, eat more greens and don’t click on dodgy links. The question is how you can make the most of the limited time and attention available. The Pareto Principle, also known at the 80/20 rule, proposes that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. If we apply this to security awareness it implies that 80% of the risk comes from 20% of topics. The problem is in knowing which 20% of users and content this applies to.
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The Importance of Executive Support
Senior management support® is something often mentioned as critical to the success of an information security awareness campaign. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, senior management help direct the usage of resources within the organization. Without their support, you won’t get much of a training budget, permission to take staff away from productive duties and you might even struggle to get a room booking. Secondly, managers set the tone for behavior in the organization and it’s common for staff to imitate their manager. This is often exhibited in the way they dress like their managers and also when they behave like their managers. Do your managers scoff that ‘the rules’ are for everyone else? That training is only for the IT-illiterate and don’t bother to show up? The bad news is that many of your staff will copy these behaviors.
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Where Do Security Awareness Topics Come From?
I’m amazed at how many people are offering advice on what information security topics I should be deploying. They seem to know what training is needed despite having never met me or my beautiful users and not knowing anything about my organisation or it’s goals. There are plenty of top ten lists of awareness topics. Numerous generic training packages are available on the internet. I’ve got nothing against generic awareness materials or topic lists as such. In fact some of it is very professional and far better than individual organisations could create. While it might be easy to use someone else’s training package or use their list of recommended training topics that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea. I worry that we haven’t properly defined the problem that we’re trying to solve. If training material X is the solution, what was the problem?
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ISSA Security Awareness Column March 2013 – Lowering Security Awareness
We spend a lot of time talking about how to raise security awareness. We fill entire books, columns and conferences with it. However, anything that can go up must also go down. How about we turn the phrase on its head and ask what lowers security awareness? Just as there are behaviours that raise security awareness there are also some that lower security awareness. But what can we do about it? Name and shame was an important step in getting software vendors to deal with security vulnerabilities in their products. We should be equally critical when human vulnerabilities are created through the promotion of unsafe attitudes and behaviours. In this column I’m going to name and shame particularly egregious examples which I think reduces security awareness.
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