Persona-driven information security awareness

Abstract

Because human factors are a root cause of security breaches in many organisations, security awareness activities are often used to address problematic behaviours and improve security culture. Previous work has found that personas are useful for identifying audience needs & goals when designing and implementing awareness campaigns. We present a six-step security awareness process both driven by and centred around the use of personas. This can be embedded into business-as-usual activities, with 90-day cycles of awareness themes. We evaluated this process by using it to devise a security awareness campaign for a digital agency. Our results suggest a persona-centred security awareness approach is adaptable to business constraints, and contributes towards addressing security risks.