Organisations in Digital Age – Information Security Aspects of Digital Workplaces

The digital age – although differently in each sector and area – is present in the life of all the companies. It means not only the IT support of planning, production, manufacturing, warehousing, trading, etc. processes, because they have already been applied for several decades and developed permanently. The digital age strongly affects the entire company, all the divisions, departments, sites, and all the employees and executives working there. The concept of digital workplace, however, goes beyond the traditional physical framework of the company, because teleworkers, suppliers and customers are also connected into the IT processes. The information has become a new type of economic commodity, acquiring, possessing or owning it, and the control above it has become an increasingly serious and complex aspect of the company’s success. In spite of the fact, that the success of the business is the well-understood interest of the company’s stakeholders (employees, employers, owners, suppliers, etc.), in a lot of cases the (not always) ethical hackers dealing with social engineering are able to find the weak points of the company’s information system through the human side of information security, due often to human negligence and irresponsibility. Our own research – involving more than 400 people from the executive staff of Hungarian companies – has led to the conclusion that only a very few of them have appropriate information security awareness. Therefore a chapter of our study introduces some possible forms of human attacks against digital workplaces and the prevention of these attacks.