Abstract
Group behaviour is a relatively under researched field in research pertaining to information security. Most behavioural studies in information security focus on the individual and how he/she reasons and eventually behaves. Recent investigations into security group behaviour have revealed that the context within which the members of a group function plays an important role. Behavioural threshold analysis has been identified as a possible tool to evaluate security group behaviour and provide insights into the possible influence of the group’s contextual milieu. Based on earlier research on contextual factors in information security, this paper embodies an elaboration on the theoretical and practical implications of the previous work by comparing two distinct information security group behaviour experiments. The contextual environments for the two experiments include a group of employees in an industry setting, as well as a group of students that reside together in a university residence. These experiments are discussed, firstly by looking at the information security behavioural threshold analysis results for the two groups, and secondly, by expounding on the external contextual factors that play a part in the formation and eventual practice of information security behaviour in a group setting. The paper concludes by reflecting on the research aims and possible future work. This research has shown that external contextual factors play an important role in information security group behaviour and its effect should be taken into account in the strategies of managing information security.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Johan Allers and Wayne Kearney for their assistance with the experiments.
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Appendix
Appendix
As mentioned in Sect. 4, this Appendix shows the cumulative behavioural threshold graphs for the information security focus areas for Email use, Password management and Incident reporting in Figs. 5, 6, and 7 respectively. The external contextual factors that contribute to the predicted eventual group behaviours for these three focus areas were discussed in Sect. 5.
Behavioural threshold analysis graph – Email use (Industry vs. Students)
Behavioural threshold analysis graph – Password management (Industry vs. Students)
Behavioural threshold analysis graph – Incident reporting (Industry vs. Students)
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Snyman, D., Kruger, H. (2022). Contextual Factors in Information Security Group Behaviour: A Comparison of Two Studies. In: Furnell, S., Mori, P., Weippl, E., Camp, O. (eds) Information Systems Security and Privacy. ICISSP 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1545. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94900-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94900-6_10
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