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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:
Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization's grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as "teachable moments" for others. "If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training," they say, "the Internet would be a much safer place."
Enough of that. The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can't users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can't they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can't they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?
Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.
[...] We must stop trying to fix the user to achieve security. We'll never get there, and research toward those goals just obscures the real problems. Usable security does not mean "getting people to do what we want." It means creating security that works, given (or despite) what people do. It means security solutions that deliver on users' security goals without -- as the 19th-century Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs aptly put it -- "stress of mind, or knowledge of a long series of rules."
[...] "Blame the victim" thinking is older than the Internet, of course. But that doesn't make it right. We owe it to our users to make the Information Age a safe place for everyone -- not just those with "security awareness."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @08:06PM
If you eat food off the ground, you have a chance of getting sick. You might be sick enough to need hospitalization, and even if your medical bills are covered, you'll still miss work. Even if you don't get fired for missing work, missing work will cost you socially when you lose face time with your peers. You can't afford to eat food off the ground because you will lose social status.
If you pick up USB sticks off the ground and put them in your work computer, your computer might get malware. It's the job of the IT guys to fix malware. By breaking your computer, you made those low-status IT losers do some actual work instead of wasting time like every low-status work-shirker does. You don't lose any social status by making work for the IT guys.
That's the cultural issue: IT ain't my fault, boss!