A pilot study of cyber security and privacy related behavior and personality traits

ABSTRACT Recent research has begun to focus on the factors that cause people to respond to phishing attacks as well as affect user behavior on social networks. This study examines the correlation between the Big Five personality traits and email phishing response. Another aspect examined is how these factors relate to users' tendency to share information and protect their privacy on Facebook (which is one of the most popular social networking sites). This research shows that when using a prize phishing email, neuroticism is the factor most correlated to responding to this email, in addition to a gender-based difference in the response. This study also found that people who score high on the openness factor tend to both post more information on Facebook as well as have less strict privacy settings, which may cause them to be susceptible to privacy attacks. In addition, this work detected no correlation between the participants estimate of being vulnerable to phishing attacks and actually being phished, which suggests susceptibility to phishing is not due to lack of awareness of the phishing risks and that real-time response to phishing is hard to predict in advance by online users. The goal of this study is to better understand the traits that contribute to online vulnerability, for the purpose of developing customized user interfaces and secure awareness education, designed to increase users' privacy and security in the future

A comparative study of cloud services use by prospective IT professionals in five countries

Individuals and organizations utilise the cloud technology and its services in various ways. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular, while there is no adequate knowledge offered for their secure use in the education for future IT professionals. It is important to understand how security and privacy issues are perceived and handled by male/female users and IT professionals of different cultures. The authors aim at presenting and scrutinizing information about cloud services’ use by prospective IT professionals in five countries, namely China, Finland, Greece, Nepal, and the UK. In particular the authors, wanting to find out what are the future IT professionals’ conceptualisations and awareness, collected data from male and female IT students in higher education, who use (or not) cloud services. The authors further illustrate the research findings by proceeding to a comparative analysis considering different perspectives such as: gender, education background, national culture (values and culture), and IT-related knowledge. The final research outcomes reveal attention-grabbing information for future IT professionals’ skills, knowledge, and digital competencies. For the IT professionals and software quality engineering communities the latter comprise a body of realistic knowledge, worthy of note when designing curricula for security technology by accommodating practical and accessible solutions (e.g., cryptography-based cloud security) for developing and enhancing the IT professionals’ role

Research Analysis of Cyber Security

In an age of cyber technology with it fast pacing and ever evolving, securing data in cyber space is a major enigmawhich needs to be resolved.With vulnerabilities everywhere, data security and privacy is always at risk. This specially comes in play when services of third party are used knowingly or unknowingly. Government and business organizations are testing and implementing security and monitoring techniques to stand a better chance in raging war against cyber-crimes. Moreover, the formulation of new methods also poses new limitations of the systems as well as the users like lack of efficiency or complexity which need to be resolved in order to get better results. In this research paper some of those limitations and their solutions are discussed

Exploring how personality traits influence privacy

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Predicting the performance of users as human sensors of security threats in social media

While the human as a sensor concept has been utilised extensively for the detection of threats to safety and security in physical space, especially in emergency response and crime reporting, the concept is largely unexplored in the area of cyber security. Here, we evaluate the potential of utilising users as human sensors for the detection of cyber threats, specifically on social media. For this, we have conducted an online test and accompanying questionnaire-based survey, which was taken by 4,457 users. The test included eight realistic social media scenarios (four attack and four non-attack) in the form of screenshots, which the participants were asked to categorise as “likely attack” or “likely not attack”. We present the overall performance of human sensors in our experiment for each exhibit, and also apply logistic regression and Random Forest classifiers to evaluate the feasibility of predicting that performance based on different characteristics of the participants. Such prediction would be useful where accuracy of human sensors in detecting and reporting social media security threats is important. We identify features that are good predictors of a human sensor’s performance and evaluate them in both a theoretical ideal case and two more realistic cases, the latter corresponding to limited access to a user’s characteristics

Evidence of personality traits on phishing attack menace among selected university undergraduates in Nigerian

Access ease, mobility, portability, and improved speed have continued to ease the adoption of computing devices; while, consequently proliferating phishing attacks. These, in turn, have created mixed feelings in increased adoption and nosedived users’ trust level of devices. The study recruited 480-students, who were exposed to socially-engineered attack directives. Attacks were designed toretrieve personal dataand entice participants to access compromised links. Wesought to determine the risks of cybercrimes among the undergraduates in selected Nigerian universities, observe students’ responses and explore their attitudes before/after each attack. Participants were primed to remain vigilant to all forms of scams as WE sought to investigate attacks’ influence on gender, students’ status, and age to perceived safety on susceptibility to phishing. Results show that contrary to public beliefs, age, status, and gender were not among the factors associated with scam susceptibility and vulnerability rates of the participants. However, the study reports decreased user trust levels in the adoption of these new, mobile computing devices