Impact and Significance of Human Factors in Digital Information Security
Abstract
In this paper, we present a study on the impact and significance of human factors in digital information security. The study focuses on digital data breaches and seeks to find out how human factors within the context of data breaches in cyberspace impact information security. Data breach in cyberspace is a major privacy and security concern that affects the integrity of information security, and thus the underlying reasons for such data breaches demand investigation. An incident of data breach may occur due to several reasons. The root cause for a data breach may yield either from technological or human factors, or both. While technological factors are mostly predictable, human factors may not be. Besides, human factors are dynamic and cannot be fully quantified. This opens the opportunity for an attacker to compromise systems by exploiting human factors. The presented study seeks to find the extent to which human factors are contributors for data breaches. Analyses on 101 real life incidents of data breaches are carried out, and the reasons behind those breaches are explored to understand the implications of human factors in these breaches.
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