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
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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If You See Something, NSA Something
A common objective of information security awareness is to encourage whistleblowers to use internal mechanisms to report their concerns. External whistleblowing and the airing of concerns in public view risks brand damage and exposure of sensitive information. The Snowden affair has shown how divided we are on the ethics of external whistleblowing. To date, much of the debate has been speculation about Snowden’s character flaws. Sometimes when trying to understand a controversial decision such as Snowden’s it helps to understand the chain of events leading up to the decision since failures in complex systems can rarely be given justice in a single newsbyte. In this case there are a series of failures that occurred prior to the employee of a subcontractor deciding to flee the country and leak sensitive information to foreign journalists:
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Uncle Sam Needs Your Trust
Trust is an incredibly important concept in information security and a vital component of influencing an audience. We know from safety risk communication research that it’s not enough to be an expert in your field. It’s not enough to be correct. You also need to be trusted by your audience. Otherwise your level of influence will be reduced and people may decide to act in ways that challenge your mission objectives.
When I wrote the July column as satire imagining what a GCHQ letter to a supportive member of the public might look like I was poking fun at the unrealistic expectations about our intelligence services that were being perpetuated. That as ‘big brother’ they knew better and were always looking out for our best interests. I recognize now that what I was also doing was challenging the notion that intelligence services innately deserved a high level of trust.
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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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Privacy Redundancy Intrusive Surveillance Mandate (PRISM)
Dear Michael Burgess of Tunbridge Wells in the UK, we in the GCHQ read with interest your recent letter to the Guardian Newspaper in which you state that you’re not bothered if the Government knows what web sites you’ve been visiting. It is refreshing sir, (and we know you are from the scanners at Heathrow airport) to find a true patriot who welcomes the state’s determination to know everything about everyone. Corporate security awareness programs have been advising for years that personal privacy is something that can’t be ‘fixed’ once lost so your willingness to permanently surrender your privacy (and the privacy of anyone you communicate with) is appreciated.
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