Friday, September 26, 2008 3:37 PM
cmosby
News from the "Well DUH!!!" category
From the SANS NewsBites newsletter today:
--Researchers Find Users Often Click Through Dialog Windows Without Reading (September 23 & 25, 2008) An experiment conducted by psychologists at North Carolina State University found that computer users often fail to distinguish fake Windows dialog boxes from legitimate ones. Sixty-three percent of the
42 students participating in the experiment clicked OK whenever a pop-up window appeared, ignoring anomalies that should have clued them in to the potential for malicious activity. The subjects appeared to view pop-up windows as hindering their intended activity; clicking the OK button is the virtual equivalent of brushing away flies.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/092508-computer-users-overeager-to-click.html?hpg1=bn
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080923-study-confirms-users-are-idiots.html
[Editor's Note (Schultz): This research confirms the obvious, but it nevertheless significant in that it provides controlled, experimental data that shed some light on the magnitude of the problem of users clicking OK just to get rid of security related dialog boxes that pop up.]
Filed under: In the News, Security