IT security : Education, Knowledge and Awareness

Abstract: IT systems that contain large volumes of information are today extremely valuable to organizations. As the IT systems grow bigger, more challenges are emerging, vulnerability increases and control decreases. Organizations are using IT security to protect their IT systems from different threats and the human factor can be seen as one of the biggest risks towards IT security. Therefore it is not optimal to only focus on the technical solutions and measures, the focus should also be on the employees IT security knowledge and IT security awareness. To increase the knowledge of IT security and to make the employees more IT security aware requires continuous work and IT security education is often mentioned as a factor to increase IT security- knowledge and awareness. Despite this, challenges are mentioned in previous research, which means that even if an employee participates in an IT security education, the organizations can not take for granted that their employees have gained IT security knowledge or know how to act more security aware. IT security education, IT security knowledge and IT security is mentioned as three factors that can affect IT security. Three research questions were intended to be answered within this research with the purpose to investigate if these factors increase each other. Three hypotheses were also forming the basis for answering the research questions. With a quantitative method and questionnaire this research reached out to 158 employees at different Swedish branches within machine manufacturing, advertising, municipal work and sales industry. Results showed that one of the three hypotheses was accepted and the other two hypotheses were not accepted. This result also gave answers to the research questions regarding that IT security education does not increase IT security knowledge, IT security knowledge does not increase IT security awareness but IT security education increases IT security awareness.