Security training: the Human Being is impossible to fix

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As long as humans sit at computer screens, there will always be infected computers. There’s just no end to people being duped into clicking links that download viruses.

12DA report at theregister.co.uk explains how subjects, unaware they were guinea pigs, fell for a phishing experiment.

  • Subjects were sent an FB message or e-mail from an unfamiliar sender, though 16 percent of the subjects who ultimately clicked reported they knew the sender.
  • The sender announced they had images from a New Year’s Eve party but not to share them.
  • 43.5% clicked the FB message link and one-quarter clicked the e-mail link.
  • Many of the subjects denied making these clicks, but most who admitted it named curiosity as the reason.
  • 5% claimed they thought their browser would protect them from an attack.

Obviously, there will always be that percentage of the human population who will allow curiosity to preside over common sense and logic. The idea of simply never, never, ever clicking a link inside an e-mail is an impossible feat for them—perhaps more difficult than quitting smoking or losing 50 pounds.

This is the battle that businesses have with their employees, which is how businesses get hacked into and massive data breaches result.

However, says the report, rigid training of employees may backfire because valid e-mails may be ignored—though it seems that there has to be a way for companies to get around this—perhaps a phone call to the sender for verification if the company is small. For large businesses, maybe executives could just resort to the old-fashioned method of reaching out to employees; how was this done before the World Wide Web was invented?

Digital signing of e-mails has been suggested, but this, too, has a loophole: some employees misinterpreting the signatures.

Nevertheless, security training is not all for nothing; ongoing training with staged phishing e-mails has been proven, through research, to make a big difference. Unfortunately, there will always exist those people who just can’t say “No” to something as mundane as images from a New Year’s Eve party from a sender they’ve never even heard of.

Robert Siciliano personal security and identity theft expert and speaker is the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Identity Was Stolen. See him knock’em dead in this identity theft prevention video.