ISSA Security Awareness Column June 2012 – Security Awareness in Crisis

You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but the information security awareness industry is in crisis. Humans are increasingly seen as the weak link in information security defences and human factors are increasing in prominence as a preferred exploit. Time after time we’re seeing expensive technical solutions bypassed by a simple call to the helpdesk or someone just asking users for their password. A cynic might say that’s because mistakes are inevitable when humans are involved. However, have we made our best attempt at managing human information security risks? In a series of columns about awareness and risk communications we’ll be taking a fresh look at the ways we attempt to manage human risks.

Technical information security solutions have advanced in leaps and bounds over the last two decades. We now have real time anti-virus, local firewalls and automated patching. It’s a far cry from the old days when we had to remember to load anti-virus manually once we started our computer. By comparison, human security management remains largely unchanged. We create information security policies and publish them on intranets. We hold mandatory training sessions. If the problem is getting worse then what is the solution? More policies? More mandatory training? Or, is there a fundamental problem in how security professionals are approaching the problem? Remind me again what the problem is we’re trying to solve? Our implicit assumption seems to be that the cause of insecure behaviour is a “lack of facts” known by an audience. Hence we distribute information in the hope the behaviour improves. But what if people have heard our message before and that didn’t fix it? Telling people again what they have likely heard before can only have a marginal return at best.