Eight lockouts is not eight bad luck stories
A help desk logs eight locked accounts in a month. Each one looks like a small problem. But eight in one month points to something deeper.
Maybe the password rule is too hard. Maybe a group of new staff were never shown how to log in. Incident data helps you see the deeper cause.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can organise incident records, find a trend and say what underlying risk it points to.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Incident | an event that harms, or could harm, a system or its data |
| Incident log | a table with one row for every incident |
| Malware | harmful software |
| Trend | a pattern over time, such as more of the same kind of incident |
| Underlying risk | the deeper cause behind a run of similar incidents |
| User profile | what a group of users needs and how well they can use their systems |
| Continuous improvement | learning from what happened and making things a little better each time |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
Starter
Have a go
Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Step 1: gather and organise
First, collect every incident. Do not trust memory. Use an incident log with one row for each incident.
Give every row the same columns: the date, the kind of incident, the device, the user group and the impact. Use the same words every time, so you can count them.
A small incident log
| Date | Kind | Device | User group | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 May | Lockout | Laptop | New starters | Low |
| 4 May | Lockout | Laptop | New starters | Low |
| 9 May | Malware | Desktop | Finance | High |
| 14 May | Lockout | Phone | New starters | Low |
| 20 May | Lost device | Tablet | Sales | Medium |
| 26 May | Lockout | Laptop | New starters | Low |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
Step 2: find the trend
Count the rows by kind, by month and by user group. In the log, "Lockout" appears four times, and all four are new starters.
That is a trend. The underlying risk is not carelessness. It is that new starters were not shown how to manage their passwords.
Step 3: the user profile
A user profile describes a group: what they need and how well they can use their systems.
New starters need a short guide. A group with special needs may need other tools. A fix that suits the profile is more likely to work than one that does not.