Fernando L. F., A., José A., M.,

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Fernando L. F., A., José A., M., & João T., P. (2015). ICT Security Review: Perceptions at Portuguese High Schools. Journal Of Systems Integration, Vol 6, Iss 3, Pp 15-24 (2015), (3), 15. [1]

Ashley Williams

This article discusses the ICT security perceptions within high schools in Portugal. The study aims to understand the reality of information security at Portuguese high schools through the use of an online survey sent to the high school community, targeting the students, teachers, and those responsible for information systems at the school (Fernando, José and João, 2015). In the literature review that authors identify three concepts that matter when the discussion involves technology, people, and computer security. The three concepts are availability, integrity and confidentiality (2015, p.15). The four stages in the evolution of technology are: the appearance of the personal computer, the appearance of the internet, the appearance of social networks, and the mobility through the integration of the last 3 stages in small an mobile devices (2015, p.16). Fernando, José and João (2015) suggest, “the threats [and] consequences, basically affecting computer data, depend on the person who operates the PC” (p.16) and that the threats have increased dramatically since the exposure to the Internet. Trust is an important factor when depending on technology. There need to be “trust on systems, trust on data, and trust on people” (2015, p.16). This trust has been broken by some of the respondents of the survey who disclosed that they do not save their work on the computer because they have lost their work from doing that before. Instead they use a personal flash drive that they consider to be more secure. The authors inform the reader “the time is past when passwords with three of four characters length were enough” (2015, p.16). There is a discussion on COBIT, which “is a framework that enables alignment between business and IT objectives, and with the advantage of supplying a common language and definitions understandable by most stakeholders” (2015, p.18)

The strengths of this paper are that it is very organised and easy to follow the thought process of the authors. The methodology they used was well thought out and executed as they created an online survey using the Google Doc platform and delivered the survey through the mailing list of national Portuguese high schools in the public and private sector. The questionnaire was available to be filled out by the participants between the dates of March 5th and April 24th, 2014. Over a month to fill out the questionnaire should have given their participants a fair amount of time to complete the 47 questions. The variety of participants they choose to have answer their questionnaire, including students, teachers and systems administrators was better than choosing only one demographic to answer their survey. Another strength of their paper was that they acknowledged the pitfalls of their methodology, suggesting the “two typical disadvantages associated with questionnaires … [being] the questionnaire was sent to several students in the North, centre and South of Portugal” and the other being “the autonomous regions of Portugal (Azores and Madeira) didn’t participate in this study” (2015, p.19). Although they considered this a disadvantage in the methodology of their study, it actually strengthens their paper by addressing the disadvantage because it shows that they are aware of how their data may be skewed. Another strength of their methodology was that “in order to decrease the probability of getting multiple answers from the same respondent, [they] collected the IP address of respondents and only the last registered response from the same user was considered valid” (2015, p.19). This is another identifier that the researchers were proactive when collecting their data to try and make it as accurate as possible.

A weakness in their paper is the uneven data that they collected from the different demographics they surveyed. Out of 291 valid answered surveys they received 88 from students, 160 from teachers, and 43 from system administrators. It would have been interesting to have received more answered surveys from the system administrators, as they are the ones who implement the ICT security on the high school computers. Another weakness of their paper is that they surveyed both private and public high schools in Portugal but they did not determine if there were any differences “considering the lack of available resources” (2015, p.23). The author’s future work is to “propose a security guide plan that should be adopted and followed by Portuguese high schools” (2015, p.23). This can be seen as a weak statement because the security guide plan could be used in more high schools in similar economic situations around the world as well, not only in Portugal.

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