Assessment of the influence of the human factor on the security of the processes of obtaining storing transmitting and processing official information

Abstract

The handling of official information of limited distribution is split by the regulatory order into four consecutive stages, and the weight of the human factor is uneven across them, while applied appraisal schemes compress it into a single coefficient with no stage marking. The aim is a quantitative assessment of the influence of stage-specific personnel behaviour on the security of the processes of obtaining, storing, transmitting and processing official information in a model organization. A stage-and-barrier simulation of the unintercepted incident intensity was built. Eleven scenario inputs are declared in the model: the annual operation volume, four personnel error rates, four barrier interception shares, a personnel preparation coefficient and a heterogeneity coefficient; lognormal multipliers are drawn over 2000 iterations with a fixed generator seed. The calculated total is 830,9 events per year. Transmission is the heaviest stage, with a calculated value of 302,3 events per year, that is 36,4% of the total. Sensitivity analysis moves the model output by about a factor of two once the personnel preparation coefficient is replaced by its lower and upper values, whereas the dispersion of execution discipline across units leaves the mean model output almost intact. The order of the stages by calculated intensity holds when the lower and the upper value of each input is substituted separately, which narrows the scenario space in which transmission gives up its first place to another operation with the document.