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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Information Security Culture – Part 2

If your organisation was an animal, what would it be? Is your organisation a risk taker? Short sighted? Perhaps it’s slow to react? I’ve worked for elephants, giraffes and even a hyena. Animals and organisations both have their behavioural quirks and ways of optimising their survival chances in their particular environment. However, what worked in the past isn’t always the best survival tactic in the present. Sometimes organisations need to adapt due to factors such as customer demand, regulatory changes or new environmental risks. Behaviours adopted in the mistaken perception that they are helpful can even be self-harming and may need to change.

Last month we discussed information security culture and the shared underlying unconscious assumptions of staff that frame it. This month we talk about how to go about trying to change security culture. Changing the culture of an organisation can be a significant challenge and I’ve seen many efforts fail.

There are three things you need to know before you start. Firstly, you need to identify what problematic behaviours exist. Secondly, you need to understand what beliefs, attitudes and unconscious assumptions are enabling them. Thirdly, you need to know what cultural values you’re aiming for to re-align the organisation’s behaviour towards it’s key goals. Potentially, this means the ‘un-learning’ of one set of beliefs and the learning of a new set.

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Information Security Culture

As I escorted him to his desk I became conscious that everyone was looking at me. I did all the usual self-checks of fly, food on face and freaky hair but came up negative on all counts. When someone had tailgated me through a secure door I had challenged them. Rather than leave them outside when they didn’t have their pass with them I offered to walk them to their desk. I found his manager who told me with an expression more serious than a budget facelift: ‘Yes, of course he works here – he’s hardly here for the view’. What had encountered amongst the engineers at this small satellite office was a very different security culture than what I was used to with my head office, ivory tower view of the world. The culture that I had encountered worked on high levels of trust. They all trusted Dave so couldn’t understand why I didn’t (even thought I’d never met him). I less than a block from the head office of this organisation and yet the security culture was completely different. For me, the experience was an eye opener that effort is needed to understand not just if people are following security policy but the extent to which policy is reflected in security culture.

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Reward and Punishment

It was a children’s birthday party. He cried and whinged and pleaded with tears streaming down his face. For about 2 minutes his mother said no but eventually she pulled a chocolate biscuit from her bag and gave it to him before turning to me and saying “I just don’t know why he cries so much”. Operant Conditioning is a phrase coined by BF Skinner that many security awareness professionals may not have heard before. Broadly, it means that ‘behaviour is a function of its consequences’. If the consequence of behaviour is positive then there is a chance to increase the magnitude or likelihood the behaviour. Alternately, negative consequences have the opposite effect.

My young friend at the birthday party had been trained to whinge and cry because he had been regularly rewarded with a treat for doing so. Just as rewards and punishments influence children’s behaviour, they are also an important factor in governance, risk and compliance. However, there are interesting quirks of rewards and punishments that need to be understood by anyone trying to influence behaviour.

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