If I had to pick what I thought were the most prevalent reasons for general lack of security – in an IT environment or a software environment – near the top of that list would be stress.

Stress? What’s that got to do with security? Quite a lot.
What happens when you get stressed, or worse, burnt out? You stop thinking straight. You start accepting things as they are just so that you can get through it, and get on with your life. You stop thinking about security.

When you’re under pressure to make a system work, one of the last things you want is a security option getting in your way. If you can get it to work faster without that option, that’s what’s going to happen. If you’re under pressure to finish developing code, you sometimes forget that one off error you told yourself to remember about. What’s important to your body is to just get it done and end the stress.

This leads to mistakes that affect the security of your system or software, maybe not just for you or your company, but for other users and companies as well. What if you’re working on a system that stores social security numbers?

What can we do about it? Unfortunately, without cooperation from your managers and company, not much. There are some companies that assume that you are not human, and ask you to work insane hours. There are some that for the most part, you put in your 40 hours a week, and you go home. And once you’re home, you don’t work. However, every person has a breaking point, and when you’ve reached yours, you’re not doing anyone any good by trying to push through and complete tasks. Take a break, go see a movie, take a nap, whatever you enjoy doing for a few hours. Come back to your particular problem with a fresh perspective.

If a few hour break isn’t enough, talk to your manager/boss about it. See if there’s something they can help you with, see if lightening your load is possible. Sometimes it is. And most companies would rather work with you to reduce your stress levels than lose you as a valuable resource.

Take a step back, breathe and help yourself and all of us by doing what you need to do to de-stress.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:13 pm by Laura Raderman and is filed under rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.