“If Only They Would Take Us Seriously” : The Behavioral Science Influencing Your Cybersecurity Culture

Abstract

What does it take from a cybersecurity professional to be heard in their organization and spread their message about the importance of cybersecurity to both the leadership and the other employees? And if that wasn’t already hard enough, what does it take to lead behavior change and build a cybersecurity culture? It has became clear that technical cybersecurity measures need to operate in harmony with, and be applied from people. Today’s employees need to practice good cyber security habits to protect the assets they handle, and their organization.

Christina Lekati

@ChristinaLekati

Christina Lekati is a psychologist and a social engineer. She specializes in the mechanisms of behavior, motivation, decision making, manipulation and deceit. She is an expert in human dynamics and passionate about social engineering. Her work is focusing on improving the human element of cybersecurity. Christina is working with Cyber Risk GmbH as a social engineering consultant and trainer. She has participated among other things in penetration tests, in trainings to companies and organizations, in vulnerability assessments, in profiling and analysis of the modus operandi, and in the process of identifying personality traits, behavioral tendencies, and demographic variables of offenders based on characteristics of illegal acts. She is also working as a consultant for the protection of high value targets from cyber threats. Christina is the main developer of the social engineering training programs provided by Cyber Risk GmbH. Those programs are intertwining the lessons learned from real life cases and previous experiences with the fields of cybersecurity, psychology, and counterintelligence. They often cover unique aspects while their main goal is to inspire delegates with a sense of responsibility and a better relationship with security. She is also an active Advisory Board Member at the OSINT Curious project, contributing to the international scene of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) with the latest news, updates and techniques on open source intelligence collection and analysis.”