Getting Permission To Use HaveIBeenPwned From Your Legal Dept
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
ISSA Security Awareness Column October 2012 – Learning From Safety Risk Communications
Any endeavour is made doubly difficult when pursued with a lack of metrics and without a clear understanding of cause and effect. When stumbling in the dark, facts are the flashlight of comprehension, illuminating the way forward when the path is unclear. Information security is often required to function in the dark with little in the way of facts to guide us. We hear noises and bump into things but can never be certain if we’re going in the right direction.
When security fails, how do we know? While failures of integrity and availability are obvious, failures of confidentiality can be silent and insidious. Some actors such as LulzSec boast about their exploits and derive their benefits from the resulting publicity. Other actors quietly go about their ‘business’ and organisations may not realise they’ve been breached. Often, even when we do discover failures of confidentiality the organisational interest is to bury it. As a result, our profession is rich in rumours but poor in facts which make it difficult when trying to understand the effectiveness of security controls.
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ISSA Security Awareness Column September 2012 – Cargo Cult Security
During the course of World War Two in the Pacific there were numerous primitive cultures on remote islands that came into contact with Westerners for the first time. Islanders were particularly impressed with the cargo that the visitors brought with them. At the conclusion of World War Two most of the visitors left and the cargo stopped arriving. Across multiple islands separated by thousands of miles a strange phenomenon occurred. Primitive cultures attempted to invite new cargo by imitating the conditions of what was happening when the cargo was arriving. They cleared spaces for aircraft landing strips and “controllers” dressed up with vines for wires and sticks for microphones. Bizarre ritualised behaviour developed around the use of artefacts like uniforms and insignias. “Cargo Cult” behaviour was a phrase coined by the scientist Richard Feynman to explain activity that occurs where appearances are superficially imitated. A result is pursued without actually understanding the underlying mechanisms of cause and effect. Pre-requisites are mistaken for causation. The pattern across so many independent island cultures suggests that this confusion is part of human nature. A good causation parody you may have heard of is a lack of pirates causes global warming.
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