Human Intelligence an Enabler for Cyber Resilience: A Case for Namibian Public Institutions

Government offices, ministries, and agencies (OMAs) under the umbrella term Namibian Public Service (NPS) are the nation’s critical infrastructure custodians and concentrated effort to safeguard these institutions from cyber-attacks is of utmost importance. OMAs are centrally connected through a complex network which allows for intercommunication among the various institutions in the Namibian public service, through this interconnectedness the attack surface is increased as a weakness in the security posture of one institution has the potential to compromise another institution causing a cascading effect. OMAs need to have good cybersecurity hygiene therefore there is a need for a comprehensive guide that takes into consideration the governance, technology, and processes aspect of security hence the need for a cybersecurity resilience model, this paper presents a model design that can be used to equip employees within the public sector to be aware of good security practices thereby become resilient to cyber-attacks. To achieve this, the researchers scrutinised the cybersecurity practices in the sampled OMAs and then designed a cybersecurity resilience model. The study adopted a mixed method approach where a case study of two sites was conducted, the sites were selected because one houses critical infrastructure and the other is the nation’s information technology policy custodian, this enabled the collection of qualitative and quantitative data sets using interviews and surveys. Participants were chosen using a non-probabilistic sampling method, and data was collected and analysed using the concurrent triangulation method to avoid bias. Some key findings from the study were a lack of password management, patch management, ineffective cyber user awareness training, no third-party security vetting mechanism, and overall poor cyber hygiene a sign of inadequacy in handling cyber-attacks. When governance, technology and processes are tackled wholly, it improves security posture. When employees are empowered, cyber resilience can be achieved.