An Exploratory Study on Sustaining Cyber Security Protection through SETA Implementation

It is undeniable that most business organizations rely on the Internet to conduct their highly competitive businesses nowadays. Cyber security is one of the important elements for companies to guarantee the normal operation of their business activities. However, there is no panacea in cyber security protection. Common security practices used are to deploy hardware and software security protection tools to combat the known security threats which may become more and more powerful later. In fact, the attackers and security practitioners are at war from time to time. As a result, such a tools-based security protection strategy cannot be sustained. On the other hand, the related awareness training for employees is ignored in a number of companies, which has made biased the decisions made by staff when facing cyber security breaches. In this study, in order to find ways to sustain such protection, we conduct a quantitative analysis to explore the key elements contributing to the SETA implementation of the companies and organizations. We evaluate the performances of eight supervised learning models in a dataset collected from cyber security breach surveys on UK businesses to perform a fundamental analysis. The detailed analysis is performed via the feature importance of features generated in the model with better performance in the task of detecting the companies and organizations with SETA implementation. The experiment result shows that the awareness related factors play the most significant role in the SETA implementation decision-making for the businesses, and most of the businesses are lacking the awareness to prevent the potential cyber security risks in the stuff using externally-hosted web services and products as well as services depending on online services.