Employee Attitudes Towards Information Security Measures: An Empirical Assessment

Information age has made information security an essential concern for us all. While institutions and organizations focus on reducing technical vulnerability by continuously improving security technologies, threats to information security have started to focus on the human element by constantly evolving in terms of target, domain and techniques used. Employees are shown to be responsible for the most critical security threats due to social engineering and careless user behavior. However, there is a lack of studies on the effect of the attitude, which is considered to be effective in predicting real behaviors, on the acceptance and use of information security measures by employees. The present study explores and tries explain employees’ attitudes towards information security measures through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). For this purpose, a survey was conducted on 1490 public employees in Zonguldak. As predicted in theory, the results have shown that perceived usefulness and ease of use have a statistically significant effect on attitude. In addition, some subdimensions of information security awareness partially have a statistically significant impact on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attide.