SOCAT Seminar Series: External speaker on information security - Leron Zinatullin

Today, as part of the SoCaT Seminar Series at The School of Computing and Technology at University of West London (UWL), we had Leron Zinatullin talking upon Information Security.

Leron Zinatullin - http://zinatullin.com

Leron Zinatullin gave the following talk:
It is difficult to ensure effectiveness of information security programme in a given organisation without paying attention to users’ behaviour. One of the challenges for the security manager when implementing information security policy is  to differentiate between malicious non-compliance and non-compliance due to the obstruction of business activities.
The main goal of this seminar is to gain an insight into information security behaviour issues from both - an end-users’ and security managers’ perspectives.

It aims to present a model to support security managers’ decision-making process when implementing security policy in the organisation, as it is important to help security managers make a user part of the system and to go beyond formal box-ticking when ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.


This talk has been rather informative, clear and straight to the point.

At the end of it, Leron has allowed a open and enriching discussion in which, among other participants, I have taken an active part due to the fact that I have taken a Human-Computer Interaction research path which covers all needs to do with technology interacted by humans.

In these regards then, I have extensively read upon two of the UK core researchers in the field of Information Security - Professor Shamal Faily & Professor Ivan Fléchais.

Professors Faily & Fléchais are especialists within the field of security and information systems. Yet, my main interest comes from their use of the User-Centered Design Persona method within this field and their specific research.

Professors Faily & Fléchais use personas to summarise user requirements in information security. And they use them very well and to their very advantage. They apply personas for different uses and in different contexts such as for weakness in security systems to access water plants and keep them safe at the same time from potential external agents that may intrude these systems.

I have very much liked to have utilised my knowledge upon usability issues and on the literature by Shamal Faily & Ivan Fléchais (mainly) in order to engage in full with Leron and his rather vast knowledge on the issue at hand.

The post is going to be extended at a later stage, as the work by Professors Faily & Fléchais in using grounded theory and personas is going to be used and cited throughout my own research.

For now, and as usual, I leave you with a song or radio station of my own choice. This time around it is a track I pretty much like - "Hallelujah", by Happy Mondays:




BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Faily, S. and Fléchais, I. 2010. Barry is not the weakest link: eliciting secure system requirements with personas. In Proc. of the 2010 British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Dundee, United Kingdom. BCS-HCI.