A PROACTIVE APPROACH OF MEASURING THE IMPACTS OF INFORMATION SECURITY AWARENESS ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, many measurement techniques are being implemented to determine the effectiveness of security awareness on social networks (SN).While these techniques are inexpensive, they are all incident-driven as they are based on the occurrence of incidence or success of attack(s). Additionally, they do not present a true reflection of awareness since cyber-incidents are hardly reported. The techniques are therefore adjudged to be post-mortem and risk permissive, the limitations that are inacceptable in industries where incident tolerance level is very low. This study deploys a password cracker technology, as a non-incident statistics approach, to proactively measure the impacts of awareness on SNs.

Key words: Security awareness; measurement techniques; non-incident statistics approach; password cracker; social networks; Socialist Online.