Educating users can make IT environment safer
Educating users in computer security is a process to combat with security evils. The more the users aware the less chance of damages to IT environment. There have been numerous interesting studies that indicate that a significant percentage of users will trade their password for a candy bar, and the Anna Kournikova worm showed us that nearly half of computer users will click on anything purporting to contain nude pictures of semi-famous females.
The real question to ask is not “can we educate our users to be better at security?” it is “why do we need to educate our users at all?” In a sense, this is another special case of “Default Permit” – why are users getting executable attachments at all? Why are users expecting to get E-mails from banks where they don’t have accounts? Most of the problems that are addressable through user education are self-correcting over time. As a younger generation of workers moves into the workforce, they will come pre-installed with a healthy skepticism about phishing and social engineering.
Dealing with things like attachments and phishing is another case of “Default Permit” – our favorite dumb idea. After all, if you’re letting all of your users get attachments in their E-mail you’re “Default Permit”ing anything that gets sent to them. A better idea might be to simply quarantine all attachments as they come into the enterprise, delete all the executables outright, and store the few file types you decide are acceptable on a staging server where users can log in with an SSL-enabled browser (requiring a password will quash a lot of worm propagation mechanisms right away) and pull them down. There are freeware tools like MIMEDefang that can be easily harnessed to strip attachments from incoming E-mails, write them to a per-user directory, and replace the attachment in the E-mail message with a URL to the stripped attachment. Why educate your users how to cope with a problem if you can just drive a stake through the problem’s heart?
When I was CEO of a small computer security start-up we didn’t have a Windows system administrator. All of the employees who wanted to run Windows had to know how to install it and manage it themselves, or they didn’t get hired in the first place. My prediction is that in 10 years users that need education will be out of the high-tech workforce entirely, or will be self-training at home in order to stay competitive in the job market. My guess is that this will extend to knowing not to open weird attachments from strangers.
