Category Archives: Risk Management

The root causes of a poor security culture within the workplace

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Demonstrating to employees that security is there to make their life easier, not harder, is the first step in developing a sound security culture. But before we discuss the actual steps to improve it, let’s first understand the root causes of poor security culture.

Security professionals must understand that bad habits and behaviours tend to be contagious. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point,[1] discusses the conditions that allow some ideas or behaviours to “spread like viruses”. He refers to the broken windows theory to illustrate the power of context. This theory advocates stopping smaller crimes by maintaining the environment in order to prevent bigger ones. The claim goes that a broken window left for several days in a neighbourhood would trigger more vandalism. The small defect signals a lack of care and attention on the property, which in turn implies that crime will go unpunished.

Gladwell describes the efforts of George Kelling, who employed the theory to fight vandalism on the New York City subway system. He argued that cleaning up graffiti on the trains would prevent further vandalism. Gladwell concluded that this several-year-long effort resulted in a dramatically reduced crime rate.

Despite ongoing debate regarding the causes of the 1990s crime rate reduction in the US, the broken windows theory can be applied in an information security context.

Security professionals should remember that minor policy violations tend to lead to bigger ones, eroding the company’s security culture.

The psychology of human behaviour should be considered as well

Sometimes people are not motivated to comply with a security policy because they simply don’t see the financial impact of violating it.

Dan Ariely, in his book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty,[2] tries to understand why people break the rules. Among other experiments, he describes a survey conducted among golf players to determine the conditions in which they would be tempted to move the ball into a more advantageous position, and if so, which method they would choose. The golfers were offered three different options: they could use their club, use their shoe or simply pick the ball up using their hands.

Although all of these options break the rules, they were designed in this way to determine if one method of cheating is more psychologically acceptable than others. The results of the study demonstrated that moving the ball with a club was the most common choice, followed by the shoe and, finally, the hand. It turned out that physically and psychologically distancing ourselves from the ‘immoral’ action makes people more likely to act dishonestly.

It is important to understand that the ‘distance’ described in this experiment is merely psychological. It doesn’t change the nature of the action.

In a security context, employees will usually be reluctant to steal confidential information, just as golfers will refrain from picking up a ball with their hand to move it to a more favourable position, because that would make them directly involved in the unethical behaviour. However, employees might download a peer-to-peer sharing application to listen to music while at work, as the impact of this action is less obvious. This can potentially lead to even bigger losses due to even more confidential information being stolen from the corporate network.

Security professionals can use this finding to remind employees of the true meaning of their actions. Breaking security policy does not seem to have a direct financial impact on the company – there is usually no perceived loss, so it is easy for employees to engage in such behaviour. Highlighting this link and demonstrating the correlation between policy violations and the business’s ability to generate revenue could help employees understand the consequences of non-compliance.

References:

[1] Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Little, Brown, 2006.

[2] Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, Harper, 2013.

Image by txmx 2 https://flic.kr/p/pFqvpD

To find out more about the behaviours behind information security, read Leron’s book, The Psychology of Information Security. Twitter: @le_rond

‘Wicked’ problems in information security

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Incorporating security activities into the natural workflow of productive tasks, makes it easier for people to adopt new technologies and ways of working, but it’s not necessarily enough to guarantee that you’ll be able to solve a particular security-usability issue. The reason for this is that such problems can be categorised as wicked.

Rittel and Webber in ‘Policy Sciences’ define a wicked problem in the context of social policy planning as a challenging – if not impossible – problem to solve because of missing, poorly defined or inconsistent requirements from stakeholders, which may morph over time and which can be demanding to find an optimal solution for.[1]

One cannot apply traditional methods to solving a wicked problem; a creative solution must be sought instead. One of these creative solutions could be to apply design thinking techniques.

Methods for design thinking include performing situational analysis, interviewing, creating user profiles, looking at other existing solutions, creating prototypes and mind mapping.

Plattner, Meinel and Leifer in ‘Design Thinking: Understand–Improve–Apply’ assert that there are four rules to design thinking, which can help security professionals better approach wicked problems:[2]

  1. The human rule: all design activity is ultimately social in nature.
  2. The ambiguity rule: design thinkers must preserve ambiguity.
  3. The redesign rule: all design is redesign
  4. The tangibility rule: making ideas tangible always facilitates communication.

Security professionals should adopt these rules in order to develop secure and usable controls, by engaging people, utilising existing solutions and creating prototypes that can help by allowing the collection of feedback.

Although this enables the design of better security controls, the design thinking rules rarely provide an insight into why the existing mechanism is failing.

When a problem occurs, we naturally tend to focus on the symptoms instead of identifying the root cause. In ‘Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production’, Taiichi Ohno developed the Five Whys technique, which was used in the Toyota production system as a systematic problem-solving tool to get to the heart of the problem.

In one of his books, Ohno provides the following example of applying this technique when a machine stopped functioning:[3]

  1. Why did the machine stop? There was an overload and the fuse blew.
  2. Why was there an overload? The bearing was not sufficiently lubricated.
  3. Why was it not lubricated sufficiently? The lubrication pump was not pumping sufficiently.
  4. Why was it not pumping sufficiently? The shaft of the pump was worn and rattling.
  5. Why was the shaft worn out? There was no strainer attached and metal scrap got in.

Instead of focusing on resolving the first reason for the malfunction – i.e. replacing the fuse or the pump shaft – repeating ‘why’ five times can help to uncover the underlying issue and prevent the problem from resurfacing again in the near future.

Eric Reis, who adapted this technique to starting up a business in his book The Lean Startup,[4] points out that at “the root of every seemingly technical problem is actually a human problem.”

As in Ohno’s example, the root cause turned out to be human error (an employee forgetting to attach a strainer), rather than a technical fault (a blown fuse), as was initially suspected. This is typical of most problems that security professionals face, no matter which industry they are in.

These techniques can help to address the core of the issue and build systems that are both usable and secure. This is not easy to achieve due to the nature of the problem. But, once implemented, such mechanisms can significantly improve the security culture in organisations.

References:

[1] Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”, Policy Sciences, 4, 1973, 155–169.

[2] Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel and Larry J. Leifer, eds.,  Design Thinking: Understand–Improve–Apply, Springer Science & Business Media, 2010.

[3] Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, Productivity Press, 1988.

[4] Eric Reis, The Lean Startup, Crown Business, 2011.

Image by Paloma Baytelman https://www.flickr.com/photos/palomabaytelman/10299945186/in/photostream/

To find out more about the psychology behind information security, read Leron’s book, The Psychology of Information Security. Twitter: @le_rond

Productive Security

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The majority of employees within an organisation are hired to execute specific jobs, such as marketing, managing projects, manufacturing goods or overseeing financial investment. Their main – sometimes only – priority will be to efficiently complete their core business activity, so information security will usually only be a secondary consideration. Consequently, employees will be reluctant to invest more than a limited amount of effort and time on such a secondary task that they rarely understand, and from which they perceive no benefit.

Research[1] suggests that when security mechanisms cause additional work, employees will favour non-compliant behaviour in order to complete their primary tasks quickly.

There is a lack of awareness among security managers[2] about the burden that security mechanisms impose on employees, because it is assumed that the users can easily accommodate the effort that security compliance requires. In reality, employees tend to experience a negative impact on their performance because they feel that these cumbersome security mechanisms drain both their time and their effort. The risk mitigation achieved through compliance, from their perspective, is not worth the disruption to their productivity. In extreme cases, the more urgent the delivery of the primary task is, the more appealing and justifiable non-compliance becomes, regardless of employees’ awareness of the risks.

When security mechanisms hinder or significantly slow down employees’ performance, they will cut corners, and reorganise and adjust their primary tasks in order to avoid them. This seems to be particularly prevalent in file sharing, especially when users are restricted by permissions, by data storage or transfer allowance, and by time-consuming protocols. People will usually work around the security mechanisms and resort to the readily available commercial alternatives, which may be insecure. From the employee’s perspective, the consequences of not completing a primary task are severe, as opposed to the ‘potential’ consequences of the risk associated with breaching security policies.

If organisations continue to set equally high goals for both security and business productivity, they are essentially leaving it up to their employees to resolve potential conflicts between them. Employees will focus most of their time and effort on carrying out their primary tasks efficiently and in a timely manner, which means that their target will be to maximise their own benefit, as opposed to the company’s. It is therefore vital for organisations to find a balance between both security and productivity, because when they fail to do so, they lead – or even force – their employees to resort to non-compliant behaviour. When companies are unable to recognise and correct security mechanisms and policies that affect performance and when they exclusively reward their employees for productivity, not for security, they are effectively enabling and reinforcing non-compliant decision-making on behalf of the employees.

Employees will only comply with security policies if they are motivated to do so: they must have the perception that compliant behaviour results in personal gain. People must be given the tools and the means to understand the potential risks associated with their roles, as well as the benefits of compliant behaviour, both to themselves and to the organisation. Once they are equipped with this information and awareness, they must be trusted to make their own decisions that can serve to mitigate risks at the organisational level.

References:

[1] Iacovos Kirlappos, Adam Beautement and M. Angela Sasse, “‘Comply or Die’ Is Dead: Long Live Security-Aware Principal Agents”, in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Springer, 2013, 70–82.

[2] Leron Zinatullin, “The Psychology of Information Security.”, IT Governance Publishing, 2016.

Photo by Nick Carter https://www.flickr.com/photos/8323834@N07/500995147/

The Psychology of Information Security – Resolving conflicts between security compliance and human behaviour

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In today’s corporations, information security professionals have a lot on their plate. In the face of constantly evolving cyber threats they must comply with numerous laws and regulations, protect their company’s assets and mitigate risks to the furthest extent possible.

Security professionals can often be ignorant of the impact that implementing security policies in a vacuum can have on the end users’ core business activities. These end users are, in turn, often unaware of the risk they are exposing the organisation to. They may even feel justified in finding workarounds because they believe that the organisation values productivity over security. The end result is a conflict between the security team and the rest of the business, and increased, rather than reduced, risk.

This can be addressed by factoring in an individual’s perspective, knowledge and awareness, and a modern, flexible and adaptable information security approach. The aim of the security practice should be to correct employee misconceptions by understanding their motivations and working with the users rather than against them – after all, people are a company’s best assets.

I just finished writing a book with IT Governance Publishing on this topic. This book draws on the experience of industry experts and related academic research to:

  • Gain insight into information security issues related to human behaviour, from both end users’ and security professionals’ perspectives.
  • Provide a set of recommendations to support the security professional’s decision-making process, and to improve the culture and find the balance between security and productivity.
  • Give advice on aligning a security programme with wider organisational objectives.
  • Manage and communicate these changes within an organisation.

Based on insights gained from academic research as well as interviews with UK-based security professionals from various sectors, The Psychology of Information Security – Resolving conflicts between security compliance and human behaviour explains the importance of careful risk management and how to align a security programme with wider business objectives, providing methods and techniques to engage stakeholders and encourage buy-in.

The Psychology of Information Security redresses the balance by considering information security from both viewpoints in order to gain insight into security issues relating to human behaviour , helping security professionals understand how a security culture that puts risk into context promotes compliance.

It’s now available for pre-order on the UK, EU or US websites.

Online Safety and Security

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We live in the developed world where it is now finally safe to walk on the city streets. Police and security guards are there to protect us in the physical world. But who is watching out for us when we are online?

Issues:

  1. Cyber crime and state-sponsored attacks are becoming more and more common. Hackers are now shifting their focus form companies to the individuals. Cars, airplanes, smart homes and other connected devices along with personal phones can be exploited by malicious attackers.
  2. Online reputation is becoming increasingly more important. Potential business partners conduct thorough research prior to signing deals. Bad reputation online dramatically decreases chances to succeed in business and other areas of your life.
  3. Children’s safety online is at risk. Cyber-bullying, identity theft; with a rapid development of mobile technology and geolocation, tracking the whereabouts of your children is as easy as ever, opening opportunities for kidnappers or worse.

Solution:

A one-stop-shop for end-to-end protection of online identity and reputation for you and your children.

A platform of personalised and continuous online threat monitoring secures you, your connections, applications and devices and ensures safety and security online.

Image courtesy ofwinnond / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Change Management

Information security professionals not only have to deal with change, more often than not they represent change. It might be changing the way a company manages access to its systems, works with third-parties or anything else.

To be effective with the change management process, security professionals should work with the business, demonstrating the value of security.

John Kotter in his book Our Iceberg is Melting tells a story about a penguin colony, which demonstrates basic principles of successful change management:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency
  2. Create a guiding coalition
  3. Develop a change vision
  4. Communicate the vision for buy-in
  5. Empower broad-based action
  6. Generate short-term wins
  7. Never let up
  8. Anchor new approaches into the culture

Cyber Insurance: Managing the Risk

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Cyber insurance is a hot topic of many debates today. It is believed to be the long-awaited cure for high-impact security risks, especially in light of constantly evolving privacy legislation and disclosure obligations. But what actually is it?

Simply put, cyber insurance is a tool intended to mitigate the loss from information security incidents.  The decision to use it, however, should be based on rigorous risk management. Firstly, a company performs a risk assessment, during which information security risks are identified and logged. This can help the business to prioritise from a cost-benefit perspective. The company can then choose a risk treatment option: it can decide to accept, mitigate, avoid or transfer the risk.

Mitigation and acceptance are quite common approaches in the information security domain. Security professionals can implement a countermeasure to reduce the likelihood and impact of the threat. However, if it is not feasible to do so for economic reasons then the risk can be accepted. In the case of avoidance, businesses can decide not to perform the activity that exposes them to the risk. Lastly, information security risk can be transferred to a third party. This is where cyber insurance can be useful.

The ownership of risk, however, can’t be transferred fully. In the case of cyber insurance, it is more about risk sharing. Both parties should understand their accountability, liability and risk allocation.

Cyber insurance should be cost-effective. But how can one calculate the cost of such product?  To understand this, we might want to look how insurance brokers work in more traditional areas. Insurance companies rely heavily on historical data, demographics and averages. The car insurance industry, for example, has evolved over many years to collate accurate statistics of the frequency of accidents per driver based on age, season, car type, country etc. in order to predict the likelihood and cost impact on a case by case basis.

For cyber insurance, however, historical data is not always readily available. Understanding the business becomes key to determining the cost. There are many parameters which can define the premium: size, territory, type of business, human errors and other unknown factors can all contribute to the price. Premiums rely on the maturity of the information security programme.

But is it possible to reduce this cost?

Yes, there are many ways to achieve cost reduction. In general, it is required for the business to demonstrate that some measures have already been taken to reduce the likelihood and impact of a potential cyber security incident. Certifications, such as ISO 27001 can be one of the ways to do so. Or for instance, having an incident response team can drive the premium down. Otherwise the insurer would have to provide its own service, hence charge the client extra. In a nutshell, premiums are never fixed. It has to be a dialogue between the company and the insurance broker. If a company adequately understands its risk, the insurance premium can and should be negotiated.

It is important to mention the importance of a holistic approach to risk treatment. Implementing controls to prevent security incidents and purchasing cyber insurance are not mutually exclusive strategies. If cost-effective, risk management and treatment should be a combination of both methods. Consider health and safety policies as an example. Safety coordinators invest in fire extinguishers minimise the impact of fire. Just like information security professionals deploy firewalls to keep malicious intruders out of the company’s network. Additionally, the building is also almost always insured. Maybe it is time to consider a similar approach to information systems.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Poker and Security

Good poker players are known to perform well under pressure. They play their cards based on rigorous probability analysis and impact assessment. Sounds very much like the sort of skills a security professional might benefit from when managing information security risks.

What can security professionals learn from a game of cards? It turns out, quite a bit. Skilled poker players are very good at making educated guesses about opponents’ cards and predicting their next moves. Security professionals are also required to be on the forefront of emerging threats and discovered vulnerabilities to see what the attackers’ next move might be.

At the beginning of a traditional Texas hold’em poker match, players are only dealt two cards (a hand). Based on this limited information, they have to try to evaluate the odds of winning and act accordingly. Players can either decide to stay in the game – in this case they have to pay a fee which contributes to the overall pot – or give up (fold). Security professionals also usually make decisions under a high degree of uncertainty. There are many ways they can treat risk: they can mitigate it by implementing necessary controls, avoid, transfer or accept it. Costs of such decisions vary as well.

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Not all cards, however, are worth playing. Similarly, not all security countermeasures should be implemented. Sometimes it is more effective to fold your cards and accept the risk rather than pay for an expensive control. When the odds are right a security professional can start a project to implement a security change to increase the security posture of a company.

When the game progresses and the first round of betting is over, the players are presented with a new piece of information. The poker term flop is used for the three additional cards that the dealer places on the table. These cards can be used to create a winning combination with each player’s hand. When the cards are revealed, the player has the opportunity to re-assess the situation and make a decision. This is exactly the way in which the changing market conditions or business requirements provide an instant to re-evaluate the business case for implementing a security countermeasure.

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There is nothing wrong with terminating a security project. If a poker player had a strong hand in the beginning, but the flop shows that there is no point in continuing, it means that conditions have changed. Maybe engaging key stakeholders revealed that a certain risk is not that critical and the implementation costs might be too high. Feel free to pass. It is much better to cancel a security project rather than end up with a solution that is ineffective and costly.

However, if poker players are sure that they are right, they have to be ready to defend their hand. In terms of security, it might mean convincing the board of the importance of the countermeasure based on the rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Security professionals can still lose the game and the company might get breached, but at least they did everything in their power to proactively mitigate that.

It doesn’t matter if poker players win or lose a particular hand as long as they make sound decisions that bring desired long-term results. Even the best poker player can’t win every hand. Similarly, security professionals can’t mitigate every security risk and implement all the possible countermeasures. To stay in the game, it is important to develop and follow a security strategy that will help to protect against ever-evolving threats in a cost-effective way.

Images courtesy of Mister GC / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Find out how security controls affect productivity in your company

 

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To expand on my research on the human aspect of security, I created a simplified model to highlight the relationship between productivity and security. The main hypothesis, is that there is a productivity cost associated with the security controls.

The interactive simulation was created to allow users to implement their own security policies and observe the relationship between risk reduction and impact on productivity cost. Easy to understand visual feedback is available immediately for the users. This helps to understand security managers’ perspective when implementing security controls in a company.

The creation of the model was inspired by research conducted by Angela Sasse and her colleagues at the University College London.

Please get in touch if you have any feedback or would like to discuss the underlying research findings.