Human Behavior and Cybersecurity – Anthony Vance, Brigham Young University
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Human Behavior and Cybersecurity
Anthony Vance, Brigham Young University
In the last ten years, we have seen a marked increase in cybersecurity threats in virtually all sectors of society, including attacks on healthcare systems (Perlroth and Sanger 2017), large- scale breaches of customer databases (McMillan et al. 2016), and attempts to influence national elections (Breeden et al. 2017, Lipton et al. 2016). As a result, academic research on cybersecurity has greatly increased.
A common thread in these threats is the central role of human behavior in cybersecurity, and the recognition that people are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. This is manifest in people’s susceptibility to phishing and social engineering attacks, weak password practices, and lack of understanding of information privacy issues, to name a few examples.
Although originally security professionals believed people to be careless or indifferent to information security, scholars on human behavior and cybersecurity have learned that people do want to protect themselves and their organizations, but that they are often unsure how to do so. Further, when presented with given vague information about cybersecurity threats, people usually prioritize their work tasks over cybersecurity policies. In addition, cognitive biases inherent to how the human brain works can also work against people’s ability to protect themselves from cybersecurity threats. This session describes cybersecurity threats that exploit people and also discusses ways people can better protect themselves and the privacy of their personal information.
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