Re: Researcher seeks volunteers for interview

[Michelle Young <myoung () IST PSU EDU>]

Ha ha, ok that's fair.  So any suggestions on how a poor master's student
could convince someone... anyone to talk to her?  Letters of recommendation
from other Listserv participants?

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 1:04 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:

> On Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:31:25 EST, Michelle Young said:
>
> > Research volunteers from the field of cyber security, 18 years of age and
> > older, are being sought to participate in a Penn State research study of
> > cyber security professionals.  Specifically, the research seeks to
> > understand how cyber security professionals make decisions under complex
> > circumstances.  The study involves a one-hour telephone interview to
> discuss
> > cognitive tasks, methods, and techniques used by the analyst to prevent
> and
> > detect cyber security attacks.
>
> Does detecting a social-engineering attack count? ;)
>
> Sorry Michelle - but that's somewhat a serious question.  Security
> professionals
> are by nature at least somewhat paranoid, and unlikely to volunteer info
> unless they're reasonably sure they know who they're talking to.
>
> And it isn't just you - we don't even have a good handle on the number of
> compromised zombie computers out there, because most of the people who have
> any hard data are often not talking because either their employer gets a
> competitive advantage from the hard data, or not wanting the black hats to
> know how much we do/don't know about their activities.