Human Factors in Cyber Security

Whilst studies of technological habits often focus on questions of addiction and dependency, our research goes further by exploring how habit might also be a force for the generation of more positive and productive behaviours. This is an important issue for cybersecurity professionals and teams, whose work is focused on how to instil habits and behaviours of cyber hygiene in their workforce of end-users. What our cultural geography research highlights is the profoundly collective nature of habit formation. Habit is more than a matter of individual psychology or personality - it demands that we take seriously how things like the material design of technical interfaces, the symbolic cues and cultural reinforcements of our social relations, and even the physical organisation of objects in the spaces in which we work, can either enable or constrain the creation of safe and secure habits.