Motivation and opportunity based model to reduce information security insider threats in organisations

A Comprehensive Assessment of Human Factors in Cyber Security Compliance toward Enhancing the Security Practice of Healthcare Staff in Paperless Hospitals

Recent reports indicate that over 85% of data breaches are still caused by a human element, of which healthcare is one of the organizations that cyber criminals target. As healthcare IT infrastructure is characterized by a human element, this study comprehensively examined the effect of psycho-socio-cultural and work factors on security behavior in a typical hospital. A quantitative approach was adopted where we collected responses from 212 healthcare staff through an online questionnaire survey. A broad range of constructs was selected from psychological, social, cultural perception, and work factors based on earlier review work. These were related with some security practices to assess the information security (IS) knowledge, attitude and behavior gaps among healthcare staff in a comprehensive way. The study revealed that work emergency (WE) has a positive correlation with IS conscious care behavior (ISCCB) risk. Conscientiousness also had a positive correlation with ISCCB risk, but agreeableness was negatively correlated with information security knowledge (ISK) risk and information security attitude (ISA) risk. Based on these findings, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation methods combined with cutting-edge technologies can be explored to discourage IS risks behaviors while enhancing conscious care security practice.

BYOD Security: A Study of Human Dimensions

The prevalence and maturity of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) security along with subsequent frameworks and security mechanisms in Australian organisations is a growing phenomenon somewhat similar to other developed nations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, even organisations that were previously reluctant to embrace BYOD have been forced to accept it to facilitate remote work. The aim of this paper is to discover, through a study conducted using a survey questionnaire instrument, how employees practice and perceive the BYOD security mechanisms deployed by Australian businesses which can help guide the development of future BYOD security frameworks. Three research questions are answered by this study: What levels of awareness do Australian businesses have for BYOD security aspects? How are employees currently responding to the security mechanisms applied by their organisations for mobile devices? What are the potential weaknesses in businesses’ IT networks that have a direct effect on BYOD security? Overall, the aim of this research is to illuminate the findings of these research objectives so that they can be used as a basis for building new and strengthening existing BYOD security frameworks in order to enhance their effectiveness against an ever-growing list of attacks and threats targeting mobile devices in a virtually driven work force.

Enterprise risk management and information technology security in the financial sector

Purpose

This study aims to empirically investigate the relationship between enterprise risk management (ERM) and information technology (IT) security within the financial sector.

Design/methodology/approach

Risk officers of financial institutions licensed by the Central Bank of Ghana constituted the sample frame. A structured questionnaire was used to elicit data from the respondents. The structural equation modeling method was employed to analyze the hypothesized model.

Findings

The results revealed that ERM has a strong positive substantial effect on IT security within financial institutions. However, organizational culture failed to moderate the relationship between ERM and IT security.

Practical implications

A well-managed risk helps to eliminate ineffective, archaic and redundant technology as the originator of rising perils and organizational concerns in today's corporate financial institutions since ERM established a substantially strong positive correlation among the variables.

Originality/value

ERM studies in the African context are rare. This paper adds to contemporary literature by providing a new perspective toward the understanding of the relationship between ERM and IT security, especially in the financial industry.

Information Security Behavior and Information Security Policy Compliance: A Systematic Literature Review for Identifying the Transformation Process from Noncompliance to Compliance

A grave concern to an organization’s information security is employees’ behavior when they do not value information security policy compliance (ISPC). Most ISPC studies evaluate compliance and noncompliance behaviors separately. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the factors that transform the employees’ behavior from noncompliance to compliance. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR), highlighting the studies done concerning information security behavior (ISB) towards ISPC in multiple settings: research frameworks, research designs, and research methodologies over the last decade. We found that ISPC research focused more on compliance behaviors than noncompliance behaviors. Value conflicts, security-related stress, and neutralization, among many other factors, provided significant evidence towards noncompliance. At the same time, internal/external and protection motivations proved positively significant towards compliance behaviors. Employees perceive internal and external motivations from their social circle, management behaviors, and organizational culture to adopt security-aware behaviors. Deterrence techniques, management behaviors, culture, and information security awareness play a vital role in transforming employees’ noncompliance into compliance behaviors. This SLR’s motivation is to synthesize the literature on ISPC and ISB, identifying the behavioral transformation process from noncompliance to compliance. This SLR contributes to information system security literature by providing a behavior transformation process model based on the existing ISPC literature.

A Review of Insider Threat Detection: Classification, Machine Learning Techniques, Datasets, Open Challenges, and Recommendations

Insider threat has become a widely accepted issue and one of the major challenges in cybersecurity. This phenomenon indicates that threats require special detection systems, methods, and tools, which entail the ability to facilitate accurate and fast detection of a malicious insider. Several studies on insider threat detection and related areas in dealing with this issue have been proposed. Various studies aimed to deepen the conceptual understanding of insider threats. However, there are many limitations, such as a lack of real cases, biases in making conclusions, which are a major concern and remain unclear, and the lack of a study that surveys insider threats from many different perspectives and focuses on the theoretical, technical, and statistical aspects of insider threats. The survey aims to present a taxonomy of contemporary insider types, access, level, motivation, insider profiling, effect security property, and methods used by attackers to conduct attacks and a review of notable recent works on insider threat detection, which covers the analyzed behaviors, machine-learning techniques, dataset, detection methodology, and evaluation metrics. Several real cases of insider threats have been analyzed to provide statistical information about insiders. In addition, this survey highlights the challenges faced by other researchers and provides recommendations to minimize obstacles.

The role of norms in information security policy compliance

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to determine which factors influence information system security policy compliance. It examines how different norms influence compliance intention.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on relevant literature on information system security policy compliance, a research model was developed and validated. An online questionnaire was used to gather data from respondents and partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse 432 responses received.

Findings

The results indicated that attitude towards information security compliance mediates the effects of personal norms on compliance intention. In addition, descriptive and subjective norms are significant predictors of personal norms.

Originality/value

Though advancement in technology has reached significant heights, it is still inadequate to guaranteed information systems’ security. Researchers have identified humans to be central in ensuring information security. To this effect, this study provides empirical evidence of the role of norms in influence information security behaviour.

European Hospitals' Transition Toward Fully Electronic-Based Systems: Do Information Technology Security and Privacy Practices Follow?

BACKGROUND

Traditionally, health information has been mainly kept in paper-based records. This has deeply changed throughout approximately the last three decades with the widespread use of multiple health information technologies. The digitization of health care systems contributes to improving health care delivery. However, it also exposes health records to security and privacy breaches inherently related to information technology (IT). Thus, health care organizations willing to leverage IT for improved health care delivery need to put in place IT security and privacy measures consistent with their use of IT resources.

OBJECTIVE

In this study, 2 main objectives are pursued: (1) to assess the state of the implementation of IT security and privacy practices in European hospitals and (2) to assess to what extent these hospitals enhance their IT security and privacy practices as they move from paper-based systems toward fully electronic-based systems.

METHODS

Drawing on data from the European Commission electronic health survey, we performed a cluster analysis based on IT security and privacy practices implemented in 1723 European hospitals. We also developed an IT security index, a compounded measure of implemented IT security and privacy practices, and compared it with the hospitals' level in their transition from a paper-based system toward a fully electronic-based system.

RESULTS

A total of 3 clearly distinct patterns of health IT-related security and privacy practices were unveiled. These patterns, as well as the IT security index, indicate that most of the sampled hospitals (70.2%) failed to implement basic security and privacy measures consistent with their digitization level.

CONCLUSIONS

Even though, on average, the most electronically advanced hospitals display a higher IT security index than hospitals where the paper system still dominates, surprisingly, it appears that the enhancement of IT security and privacy practices as the health information digitization advances in European hospitals is neither systematic nor strong enough regarding the IT-security requirements. This study will contribute to raising awareness among hospitals' managers as to the importance of enhancing their IT security and privacy measures so that they can keep up with the security threats inherently related to the digitization of health care organizations.