Why the Take9 Cybersecurity Campaign is Doomed to Fail
2025-05-30
The new Take9 cybersecurity awareness campaign encourages pausing for nine seconds before clicking links or downloading files. However, this article argues it's ineffective. The nine-second pause is unrealistic in daily life, similar past campaigns have failed, and it wrongly blames users, ignoring systemic design flaws. A successful campaign would guide users through a two-step process: triggering suspicion and then directing their attention to what to look for and how to evaluate it. Simply pausing isn't enough; cognitive scaffolding and system designs accounting for dynamic interactions are necessary. The author concludes that fixing the system, not the user, is key.
Tech
user education