The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

infosec-and-the-affect-heuristic

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

Perhaps there is a lesson for infosec professionals in this post on the Affect heuristic on Overcoming Bias:

Suppose an airport must decide whether to spend money to purchase some new equipment, while critics argue that the money should be spent on other aspects of airport safety. Slovic et. al. (2002) presented two groups of subjects with the arguments for and against purchasing the equipment, with a response scale ranging from 0 (would not support at all) to 20 (very strong support). One group saw the measure described as saving 150 lives. The other group saw the measure described as saving 98% of 150 lives. The hypothesis motivating the experiment was that saving 150 lives sounds vaguely good - is that a lot? a little? - while saving 98% of something is clearly very good because 98% is so close to the upper bound of the percentage scale. Lo and behold, saving 150 lives had mean support of 10.4, while saving 98% of 150 lives had mean support of 13.6.

The post also shows that people tend to over-estimate the value of going with known brands, even though they might not add any extra value:

Ganzach (2001) found the same effect in the realm of finance. According to ordinary economic theory, return and risk should correlate positively - or to put it another way, people pay a premium price for safe investments, which lowers the return; stocks deliver higher returns than bonds, but have correspondingly greater risk. When judging familiar stocks, analysts' judgments of risks and returns were positively correlated, as conventionally predicted. But when judging unfamiliar stocks, analysts tended to judge the stocks as if they were generally good or generally bad - low risk and high returns, or high risk and low returns.

But perhaps you don't have time to consider all this, because you've got a deadline!

Finucane et. al. also found that time pressure greatly increased the inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit, consistent with the general finding that time pressure, poor information, or distraction all increase the dominance of perceptual heuristics over analytic deliberation.

i-did-not-think-i-was-the-dog

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

My friend Ed Rackley has a quote from Blake in his sig line:

'A dog starv'd at his Master's gate
predicts the ruin of the State...' -- Blake

is-this-how-it-starts

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

According to the WSJ Tech Alert I just got on my soon-to-be-a-brick Blackberry, Google shares dropped 19% after income 'surged' 82% to $372.2 million.

liability-for-account-fraud

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

Good stuff from Ian Grigg about phishing and liabilities.

downtime-expected

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

We're moving offices tomorrow (9/11/08) and expect to have some downtime while we migrate the servers. We will be down from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM EDT. Thanks for your patience. This will affect mail and the certificate servers.

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