Assessing the Insider: dis/engaged hero or armed villain

This work aims to explore human factors by understanding engagement, and what the barriers to engagement might be, and what they mean for cybersecurity behaviour. Engagement can involve communications campaigns which aim to influence behaviour change but engagement can also relate to the relationship between the employer and the

employee, and the degree of commitment, trust, loyalty, psychological contract and moral disengagement that may be playing a part in the development (or absence) of cybersecurity behaviour. We can't assume that given the appropriate tools and knowledge that people will engage and adopt conducive cybersecurity behaviour just because they are asked to.

This work explores the hidden depths psychologically-speaking, to better understand human factors and how they relate to cybersecurity, and the most effective ways of stimulating long-term behaviour change through cybersecurity awareness campaigns. So far, evaluation of awareness campaigns have centred around social media statistics,

which is not helpful when trying to understand actual impact and behaviour change. This work also looks deeply into Insider Threat and aims to develop preventative tools with the use of metrics that serve to identify insider risk at an early stage. This is useful to all organisations, but particularly security services who have a graver need to hire

and retain talent that will remain committed and morally engaged to protecting the nation and its infrastructure. In this way, this work aims to develop ways to advance and promote interventions that help to create a secure and thriving environment in the face of constant threat of cyberattack and espionage.