Users to blame for insecurity - natch

"USER ERROR" IS TO blame for most things in life
according to many IT admins, so it should probably
come as no surprise to learn that the firms think
their own users are the constituency most likely to
cause network security issues.

A lot of polls ask you to believe that it’s the enemy
within that is most dangerous to corporate LANs with
unscrupulous looking contractors generally getting it
in the neck for their tendency to look eccentric, act
shifty in social situations and never buying their
round with the permies. But, according to a new survey
from Sophos, it’s the PAYE blighters in and out of the
office that are the most feared.

Forty-four per cent of respondents to the survey said
standard office users were most likely to be at the
root of problems while thirty-one per cent said remote
or mobile users were most likely to cause problems,
ahead of 25 per cent saying guests or external
contractors are the most iffy.

Of course, a lot of users are pretty stupid and tend
to use their systems as a security crap-shoot where
downloading mouse cursors, clicking on promises of
sordid images and circulating scam appeals is just
another day in the office of drudgery. Offsite workers
are also difficult to patch and keep honest in terms
of what rubbish they’re installing on their machines
and which processes they could be bothered to follow.

Maybe they didn’t ask the question but disenfranchised
or just plain criminal internal ITers might have been
suggested as another plausible response, given some of
the more high-profile cases that have been reported.

However, thick end-users are usually good for a laugh.
Ask an IT department not too many miles away about the
recent case of the user that had problems with his DVD
drive. He had been inserting the disk into the drive
cavity in a wafer-thin gap below the caddy. Quite a
skill when you come to think of it. µ