News: Security, Do I Care??!!

I once read a book that said, among other things, “You can never truly give money away.” The point it was making was that the act of giving has a certain responsibility – if you hand a large wad of cash to a charity, for example, you will want to know that the money is being spent wisely.

A good theory perhaps, but it doesn’t fit very well with the golden rule of IT security – that the things we dislike, or don’t know how to deal with, can quickly be categorised as somebody else’s problem. In business as in daily life, people will – in principle – pay to have certain problems dealt with by others, with a flick of the hand and a cry of “make it go away”.

Just how much does this principle apply in security today? Well, like all good researchers, we thought we would ask the Reg audience in the form of a mini-poll.

The first question we asked in our most recent poll was: "Exactly who is involved in security decisions?" We asked questions around general security and information security, and the results came out much the same. As you can see from Figure 1, it certainly isn’t the case that the business leaves IT to just get on with it.

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