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Towards understanding IT security professionals and their tools

Published: 18 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We report preliminary results of our ongoing field study of IT professionals who are involved in security management. We interviewed a dozen practitioners from five organizations to understand their workplace and tools. We analyzed the interviews using a variation of Grounded Theory and predesigned themes. Our results suggest that the job of IT security management is distributed across multiple employees, often affiliated with different organizational units or groups within a unit and responsible for different aspects of it. The workplace of our participants can be characterized by their responsibilities, goals, tasks, and skills. Three skills stand out as significant in the IT security management workplace: inferential analysis, pattern recognition, and bricolage.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
SOUPS '07: Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Usable privacy and security
July 2007
188 pages
ISBN:9781595938015
DOI:10.1145/1280680
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • CyLab

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 July 2007

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. ethnography
  3. security management
  4. security tasks
  5. security tools
  6. usable security

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  • Article

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SOUPS '07
Sponsor:
SOUPS '07: The third Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
July 18 - 20, 2007
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 49 submissions, 31%

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  • (2024)Developers' Approaches to Software Supply Chain Security: An Interview StudyProceedings of the 2024 Workshop on Software Supply Chain Offensive Research and Ecosystem Defenses10.1145/3689944.3696160(56-66)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cybervulnerability Impact Assessment for Energy Critical InfrastructureProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642493(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Riverside: A design study on visualization for situation awareness in cybersecurityInformation Visualization10.1177/1473871623118922023:1(40-66)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Social Transparency in Network Monitoring and Security SystemsProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3627773(37-53)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Security Champions Without Support: Results from a Case Study with OWASP SAMM in a Large-Scale E-Commerce EnterpriseProceedings of the 2023 European Symposium on Usable Security10.1145/3617072.3617115(260-276)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
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  • (2023)A Narrative Review of Factors Affecting the Implementation of Privacy and Security Practices in Software DevelopmentACM Computing Surveys10.1145/358995155:14s(1-27)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2023
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