Information Security and Ethics Awareness: A Concise Comparative Investigation.

One of the major challenges in information systems is securing information against unauthorized access and usage by their users. Perhaps nowhere is this challenge more evident than in a university setting, especially when providing computing resources to a diverse and widespread student population. The main purpose of this study was to conduct a comparative investigation of information security and ethics awareness of students in a university environment over the interval of one decade. Two sets of surveys were conducted with a decade time difference – in 2005 and in 2016. A concise, two-part questionnaire consisting of twenty one questions was used. The first part measured the participants’ general awareness of information security; the second part measured participants’ awareness of ethical information use. The collected data was subjected to a battery of statistical analyses to reveal the precise differences between the two surveys. In brief, the results showed overall a significant increase in the awareness of information security and a significant decrease in unethical behavior, indicating increased awareness of information ethics in the student population. Consequently, several recommendations are provided to increase the awareness of information security and ethics in university environments. The future plan is to administer this survey and collect data from other universities in the region and eventually expand this research to a national level