Diffusion of Responsibility when it comes to Information Security, and why it's a bad thing for businesses - Cyber Tip Tuesday video

Welcome to this week's cyber tip Tuesday. This week James is talking about diffusion of responsibility and the problems it can cause.

Security is often a casualty of diffusion of responsibility.

This is characterised as the decreased responsibility of action and consequence that individuals feel, when they are part of a group.

As information security is, by definition, the responsibility of everybody within an organisation, the conditions offer a perfect environment for this well-documented psychological phenomenon to emerge.

You can mitigate this by introducing tighter technical controls to support your existing policies but a more effective approach is to work with your people to re-introduce individual responsibility for security.

This can be through frequent training and awareness programs or by incentivising positive behaviours.

If you'd like to know more about how your organisation can protect itself better, please get in touch.