INFORMATION SYSTEMS SECURITY AND USERS' BEHAVIOR

ABSTRACT To guarantee their continuity and success in an increasingly global and changing society, where organizations need to have useful and necessary information always available in a fast and efficient manner in order to develop their daily activities, information security becomes a key factor. This study is meant to know whether the behavior and actions of Information Systems users are a risk or a protection to these systems security. In order to reach this objective we carried out a bibliographical review based on secondary sources that allowed us to develop a questionnaire for data collection. Secondly we used an online questionnaire to gather answers from 780 subjects who worked mainly in Portugal. The collected data were subject to a simple statistical treatment, specially frequency and analysis of means. The main conclusion derived from this study shows that in general users are considered to be a protection for the information systems security in organizations.