Understanding Conceptions about Digital Threats : Assessing Public Knowledge of Cyber Threats

Sammanfattning: As technology and Internet use continue to grow globally, cybersecurity has become an increasingly important topic to ensure the safety of individual consumers online. It is a growing cause for concern that cyber attacks are on the rise, as has been the case during the global pandemic. Cybersecurity awareness among the general population is of utmost importance to mitigate and prevent cyber attacks. One of the primary purposes of this study was to identify the existence and measure the extent of knowledge gaps between experts and non-experts, within the field of cybersecurity. This was done by evaluating how experts and non-experts rate the severity of different vulnerabilities. Through extensive collaboration with a technology startup within the f ield of digital design and e-commerce, four vulnerabilities were identified in the startup’s IT environment. These vulnerabilities were simplified and described in four separate scenarios, for the sake of being digestible for a nonexpert audience. The scenarios were used to construct an extensive survey, which asked participants how they would rate the severity of each scenario, using a 1-5 Likert scale. Severity was measured using three vulnerability metrics, including Attack Complexity (AC), Remediation Level (RL) and Confidentiality (C). In many cases, experts and non-experts rated the severity of the studied vulnerabilities similarly. However, the results of this study primarily showed that there doesexiststatistically significant differences intheperceivedseverity between the groups. Using expert responses as a baseline, it was possible to identify for which metrics and in which contexts the lack of cybersecurity awareness existed among non-experts. This lack of awareness was equated with the existence of a knowledge gap. For future work, it would be of great interest to further analyze the extent of and how to reduce this knowledge gap.