How IT teams can use ‘harm reduction’ for better cybersecurity outcomes

It’s a well-known fact that humans are — and will continue to remain — one of the weakest links in any company’s cyber defenses. Security admins have tried to help the situation through random phishing tests and training, ultimatums, eliminating local control over a given device, and even naming and shaming those unlucky souls who clicked on the wrong link in an email.

Results have been middling at best, as shown by the finding in Verizon’s “2022 Data Breach Investigations Report” (DBIR) that the vast majority of breaches start with phishing and social engineering.

Kyle Tobener, vice president and head of security and IT at Copado, says that it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, businesses can take a page from the medical community and find a much more effective approach through the principle of harm reduction. That essentially means adopting a focus on minimizing or mitigating bad outcomes from bad behavior rather than attempting to eliminate bad behavior completely.

How Harm Reduction Applies to Cybersecurity

In a session next week at Black Hat USA entitled “Harm Reduction: A Framework for Effective & Compassionate Security Guidance,” Tobener plans to discuss this fresh way of thinking about user behavior, education, and awareness when it comes to cyber threats.

“Harm reduction is a big topic in the healthcare space, but it hasn’t really made its way into information security all that much,” he tells Dark Reading, adding that as a cancer survivor and brother of someone who wrestled with substance addiction, he learned about harm reduction firsthand.

“Unfortunately, what we see is still mostly abstinence-based guidance being in a lot of scenarios by security people,” he says.

To illustrate the contrast between the two approaches, he uses the example of the attention-grabbing Super Bowl ad back in February from Coinbase, which featured a QR code bouncing around the screen, pong-like.

“If you went to Twitter, right after that, there were thousands of security people saying that you should never use a QR code if you don’t know where that QR code’s from,” he says. “That guidance is not effective whatsoever. I’m sure millions of people used that QR code, and if your focus is giving guidance that isn’t practical or pragmatic, that people aren’t going to follow, then it’s going to be very ineffective and you’re wasting an opportunity to educate those people in a way that’s actually useful.”

In a harm-reduction approach, the answer would have been to assume that people were going to click on such an intriguing item (and indeed, QR codes are so widespread in their use in general that asking people to never use them is a simple non-starter), and build a defensive strategy with that in mind.

To read the complete article, visit Dark Reading.