Why Take9 Will Not Improve Cybersecurity ⇥ darkreading.com

Bruce Schneier and Arun Vishwanath, Dark Reading:

There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people — you, me, everyone — should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.

There’s a website — of course — and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities.

We will always struggle to accurately identify malicious emails because that is the whole point of them. When criminals are able to scam those who are professionals in this field — people like a LastPass system engineer, Jim Browning, and Troy Hunt — it is clear we cannot expect an average user to be a so-called human firewall.