One word

On LinkedIn there was a word game in the group “Information Security Community“. The deal was to name what you think is the single most important thing in IT security. The now over 1 year old discussion is still active and keeps popping up in my LinkedIn newsletters. While I do not agree you can put a single word on the most important thing, I do however find the discussion interesting as it could put a perspective on security when we look at the data that can be collected from this.

Collecting the data

After browsing the discussion I decided to extract all the answers from the thread, process it and try to visualize what everyone is thinking is their single most important thing in IT security.

I developed a small tool which processed the text from the thread, removed all the garbage and collected the words.

Once I had the code ready I got the following stats from it:

268 unique words
471 words total
697 total comments in thread

I only collected the posts which was submitted as one word only. I realize I missed out on some replies as the word they submitted was in a post with more than 1 word, but I do not want to over complicate the code nor do it manually. The words and numbers in my excerpt of the thread is still relevant.

Visualizing the data

My idea for visualizing was to make a cloud of all the words, and based on how many mentions the word has the bigger the item. A mind map tool is perfect for making this. I decided to go with https://bubbl.us/. This online tool is free and worked just right for what I was doing.

Word cloud

Infosec Tree

The top words in the clouds are:

awareness 44
education 34
people 13
training 11
diligence 8
knowledge 7
intelligence 6
experience 5
monitoring 5
prevention 5

My conclusion is that the general awareness around security is very important and most definitively needs to improve. If we can train and educate our people, we will increase awareness and in turn make us inherently more secure.

[important]I encourage you to leave a comment below and discuss![/important]

Extra: All words with 2 or more votes

Extra 2:

I posted a link to this article on http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec and a user called Chocolategirl made some http://wordle.net pictures out of the words. They turned out real good.

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Can you use ONE WORD to describe the most important information security solution in your arsenal