Email security awareness - A practical assessment of employee behaviour

Abstract

Email communication is growing as a main method for individuals and organizations to communicate. Sadly, this is also an emerging means of conducting crime in the cyber world, e.g. identity theft, virus attacks etc. The need for improving awareness to these threats amongst employees is evident in media reports. Information security is as much a people issue as a technology one. This paper presents a description and results of an email awareness experiment that was performed amongst staff from a South African university. It is shown how management can use these results to focus and improve ICT awareness. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.