Is Cyber Awareness Really Helping?
Introduction
While most would argue that cyber awareness is something we need to implement into as many people as possible, is it helping the majority with cyber hygiene? While companies stress this significantly for the safety factors, they want to understand this better by using a metric called return on investment. From how in depth this article talks about inclusivity, it shows a need for consistent cyber awareness training. Without it more people would be vulnerable at becoming a potential victim not only in an organizational standpoint but a personal standpoint as well.
Hypothesis, Research, and Data
The biggest things that were questioned within this article was the effectiveness of cyber awareness programs and what metrics helped show this the best. Mr. Chaudhary wanted to see if cyber awareness training would reduce security incidents by creating safer cyber practices. With this article using a mixed method approach, Surveys seemed to be the most popular due to the anonymity and the privacy from other tests monitoring what they look up online. According to Mr. Chaudhary regarding the quantitative methods, “They do not answer what score is an acceptable level of awareness. This is an important question but is contextual and will vary depending on the target topic and audience type.” (Chaudhary)
Relation To the Class
With the research methods being favored in the Archival sense. It makes sense that it can attract a bigger target audience through web forms or emails alone. This can also help from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs under the safety/security section for the people that are honest when taking these surveys. While cyber awareness training needs to be consistent, I think the best way to evolve the efficiency is to focus the training on their daily tasks. Another great way that it relates to the slides is symbolic interactionism and conflict theory. Throughout the online interactions that happen every day they would start to understand the functions of security and why cybersecurity is important.
In Conclusion
In summary, both research methods showed companies OK at best data between monitoring traffic, holding cyber awareness classes, and the behavioral changes from each metric they wanted to monitor. With each of these metrics, they can be fine-tuned to best suit the needs for their organization. This article offers different strategies that several organizations can use today to help have better cyber hygiene and across society as a whole. It really puts into perspective how important symbolic interactionism and conflict theory matter for behaviors to change within cyberspace.
References
Chaudhary, S., Gkioulos, V., & Katsikas, S. (2022, May 23). Developing metrics to assess the effectiveness of cybersecurity awareness program. OUP Academic. https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/8/1/tyac006/6590603?searchresult=1