The establishment of a mobile phone information security culture: linking student awareness and behavioural intent

Abstract

The information security behaviour of technology users has become an increasingly popular research area as security experts have come to recognise that while securing technology by means of firewalls, passwords and offsite backups is important, such security may be rendered ineffective if the technology users themselves are not information security conscious. The mobile phone has become a necessity for many students but, at the same time, it exposes them to security threats that may result in a loss of information. Students in developing countries are at a disadvantage because they have limited access to information relating to information security threats, unlike their counterparts in more developed societies who can readily access this information from sources like the Internet. The developmental environment is plagued with challenges like access to the Internet or limited access to computers. The poor security behaviour exhibited by student mobile phone users, which was confirmed by the findings of this study, is of particular interest in the university context as most undergraduate students are offered a computer-related course which covers certain information security-related principles. During the restructuring of the South African higher education system, smaller universities and technikons (polytechnics) were merged to form comprehensive universities. Thus, the resultant South African university landscape is made up of traditional and comprehensive universities as well as universities of technology. Ordinarily, one would expect university students to have similar profiles. However in the case of this study, the environment was a unique factor which had a direct impact on students’ learning experiences and learning outcomes. Mbeki (2004) refers to two economies within South Africa the first one is financially sound and globally integrated, and the other found in urban and rural areas consists of unemployed and unemployable people who do not benefit from progress in the first economy. Action research was the methodological approach which was chosen for the purposes of this study to collect the requisite data among a population of university students from the ‘second economy’. The study focuses on the relationship between awareness and behavioural intention in understanding mobile phone user information security behaviour. The study concludes by proposing a behaviour profile forecasting framework based on predefined security behavioural profiles. A key finding of this study is that the security behaviour exhibited by mobile phone users is influenced by a combination of information security awareness and information security behavioural intention, and not just information security awareness