Category: Psychology
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A Passing Fad
Why Bother? Security awareness training doesn’t work. That’s so well known, it’s getting to be almost trite to point it out. Last survey I saw was based in a sample of about 20,000 people. The researchers were looking for some sort of correlation between having recently completed a phishing awareness course, and being less likely…
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L’enfer, c’est les autres
AI and cyber… yawn… Inevitably I guess, the hype around AI and security focusses on technology. Assessing networks for inherent vulnerabilities, analysing incoming traffic for threats, (and again, inevitably) searching for possible phishing emails, thereby taking the unreliable human out of the loop, and in the process, further reducing their chances of learning from experience.…
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Environmental Concerns
Egon Brunswick (1903-1955) argued that organisms (read “people”) exist within an environment with which they interact, and which in part shapes their behaviour. So the idea has been around for a while now, but security practitioners don’t seem to have caught on to its relevance to cyber. Instead, users are given advice based on the…
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That’s why they call it research…
Research, at least as far as the cyber industry is concerned, seems to take a limited number of forms. For the most part, it seems to be about looking for technical vulnerabilities. Sometimes it appears as a sentence starting “Research proves that…”, usually in a message from a cyber company with kit to sell. Occasionally…
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Decisions, decisions…
Excuses, excuses… When we knowingly contravene beliefs that we perceive to be important, we tend to experience a feeling of discomfort. One theory says that we then bring in “neutralisations” – excuses that we make for ourselves, to waft away that discomfort. The idea’s been around for some time, and it’s been applied to e.g.…