CYBERSECURITYIs Your Cybersecurity Strategy Undermined by These Six Common Pitfalls?

Here’s a pop quiz for cybersecurity pros: Does your security team consider your organization’s employees to be your allies or your enemies? Do they think employees are the weakest link in the security chain? Let’s put that last one more broadly and bluntly: Does your team assume users are clueless? 

Your answers to those questions may vary, but a recent article by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) computer scientist Julie Haney highlights a pervasive problem within the world of computer security: Many security specialists harbor misconceptions about lay users of information technology, and these misconceptions can increase an organization’s risk of cybersecurity breaches. These issues include ineffective communications to lay users and inadequately incorporating user feedback on security system usability. 

“Cybersecurity specialists are skilled, dedicated professionals who perform a tremendous service in protecting us from cyber threats,” Haney said. “But despite having the noblest of intentions, their community’s heavy dependence on technology to solve security problems can discourage them from adequately considering the human element, which plays a major role in effective, usable security.”  

The human element refers to the individual and social factors impacting users’ security adoption, including their perceptions of security tools. A security tool or approach may be powerful in principle, but if users perceive it to be a hindrance and try to circumvent it, risk levels can increase. A recent report estimated that 82% of 2021 breaches involved the human element, and in 2020, 53% of U.S. government cyber incidents resulted from employees violating acceptable usage policies or succumbing to email attacks. 

Haney, who has a comparatively unusual combination of expertise in both cybersecurity and human-centered computing, wrote her new paper, “Users Are Not Stupid: Six Cyber Security Pitfalls Overturned,” to help the security and user communities become allies in mitigating cyber risks.  

“We need an attitude shift in cybersecurity,” Haney said. “We’re talking to users in a language they don’t really understand, burdening them and belittling them, but still expecting them to be stellar security practitioners. That approach doesn’t set them up for success. Instead of seeing people as obstructionists, we need to empower them and recognize them as partners in cybersecurity.”