Current Status of Security Awareness - Essay Example

Therefore, perspectives and items that represent information security awareness should meet basic operational or user-level information security concerns. Organizational size should not differentiate among the information security concerns for desktop computer management, computer virus protection, and local-area-network issues. These types of information security concerns are applicable to basic user-level information security awareness in the business computing-environments. Therefore, in developing an information security awareness construct, two questions must be considered: “A domain definition of a concept is the specific meaning of interest for a given research context and an adequate domain can be extremely useful in furthering a topic of interest to academic societies” (Templeton, 2000, p. 57). The literature expresses three interrelated perspectives of technology, policy, and threat context for a definitional meaning of information security awareness (ISA).

Schou and Trimmer (2004) stated that technology is the most obvious and expensive countermeasure, which summarizes the technology view. The technology perspective views ISA as an assortment of hardware and software capabilities that individual IS users, with sufficient computer literacy, manipulate as tools. However, the costs associated with technology acquisition, implementation, and training can be prohibitive. The information security literature provides a theoretical basis leading to the belief that different technology capabilities and associated computer literacy will affect ISA.

Through the technology view, ISA represents an individual IS user applying a specific, appropriate technology for a specific security concern. Schou and Timmer. (2002) illustrated the technology view with the variety of technologies made available to secure Internet computing. A second ISA measure from the technology view is user comprehension, or understanding specific technologies to address