Rebooting IT Security Awareness – How Organisations Can Encourage and Sustain Secure Behaviours

Abstract

Most organisations are using online security awareness training and simulated phishing attacks to encourage their employees to behave securely. Buying off-the-shelf training packages and making it mandatory for all employees to complete them is easy, and satisfies most regulatory and audit requirements, but does not lead to secure behaviour becoming a routine. In this paper, we identify the additional steps employees must go through to develop secure routines, and the blockers that stop a new behaviour from becoming a routine. Our key message is: security awareness as we know it is only the first step; organisations who want employees have to do more to smooth the path: they have to ensure that secure behaviour is feasible, and support their staff through the stages of the Security Behaviour Curve – concordance, self-efficacy, and embedding – for secure behaviour to become a routine. We provide examples of those organisational activities, and specific recommendations to different organisational stakeholders.