Building Security Awareness Culture to Serve E-Government Initiative

Recently, many countries have adopted E-Government initiatives for providing public E-Services to their citizens. These initiatives, together with the existing and emerging private initiatives which offer E-Services, lead to a dramatic increase in the number of Internet users. This will form what is now known as E-Society. All E-Government initiatives consider citizen-centered approach, where user’s security and privacy is a major issue. The level of citizen’s engagement in these initiatives will depend on the extent of his/her confidence in the security system used by these initiatives. This imposes the need for developing computer security packages. These packages are intended to help users protect their assets such as information, databases, programs, and computer services from any harm or damage. The level of harm or damage that could happen to assets varies from one user to another. This variation depends on: users’ awareness of possible threats, their knowledge of the source of threats, and if they are applying security controls or not. This paper aims to analyze current users’ level of awareness and to propose possible methods in order to increase the level of users’ awareness i.e. education, continues education, and training. This chapter is organized as follows: the first section presents an introduction, where the importance of security awareness to E-Government initiatives is highlighted and also it presents a research idea, the second section introduces the experimental design for a more comprehensive research that we are looking to carry on in later stages and specifies the objective of this stage, the third section presents results and discussions where we provide our own proposal of methods to increase the level of users awareness; finally, a conclusion is presented. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-789-3.ch024