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Developing a usable security approach for user awareness against ransomware
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe main purpose of the research presented in this thesis is to design and develop
a game prototype for improving user awareness against ransomware, which has been
reported as the most significant cyber security threat to the United Kingdom by the
National Cyber Security Centre. Digital transformation is helping individuals, organisations,
governments and Industrial control systems to modernise and improve
their effectiveness. At the same time, cyber crimes are evolving and targeting essential
services. A successful cyber attack can compromise users’ privacy, bring bad
publicity and financial damage to organisations and target national security.
A literature review was conducted to understand threats to the cyber social
system. Literature in this thesis reports attackers exploit humans as the weakest
link to execute successful security breaches. Therefore to address this challenge, a
significant gap has been identified as an opportunity to contribute to user awareness
of the ransomware cyber security threat.
The current thesis proposes RansomAware a novel game prototype to improve
user awareness. The game is based on Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT)
model. In this thesis two studies are carried out, study 1 empirically validates the
elements of TTAT to be embedded in the RansomAware prototype and reports a
significant change in users’ motivation to avoid ransomware cyber security threat
55% and avoidance behaviour 29%, whereas study 2 evaluates game usability and
report significant results of SUS average score of 87.58 and statistical results of p <
0.01 indicate user’s satisfaction of the RansomAware. Finally, the research provides
guidelines on how the proposed RansomAware game can be adopted by practitioners
and individuals to improve their awareness against the ransomware cyber security
threat