IN THIS CHAPTER
Your Users: People with Whom You Share Your Computer
The Bad Guys: People Who Would Do Your System Harm
Everybody Else
Users! Users complicate things, and so do the rest of those unpredictable humans who visit, probe, or just occasionally brush past your computer on the network. If it weren't for the human beings in the equation, keeping a system secure would be so much easier! This may sound like something demeaning that fell from the lips of one of the particularly humorless system managers you might know, but until computers start thinking for themselves , it's really quite true. Behind almost every security threat to your system, there are the actions of some person or persons. Some of them are consciously malicious actions, but there are a multitude of situations where the unconscious behavior of users is at fault. Because of this, in more ways than one, computer security is a people problem, and some of the best results in terms of absolute increases in your system's security can be obtained by addressing the people and modifying their behavior. This chapter, the last of the primarily philosophical discussions in this book, examines the human issues that bear upon your system's security, and where you can best work to help your system's users work consciously toward, instead of unconsciously against, your goal of system security.
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