Identifying the Effect of Data Breach Publicity on Information Security Awareness Using Hierarchical Regression

Abstract

The technological evolution has formed new challenges for organizations to safeguard their information as digital assets. Information Security Awareness (ISA) is the cognitive state where individuals possess the comprehension of information security, threats, and the capability to develop preventive strategies. Prior studies discovered that human mistakes or misbehavior is the most vulnerable link in information security due to insufficient security awareness. There were massive data breaches reported throughout the years globally. Literature shows that individuals will develop their evaluations of risks and sense of security awareness when receiving security risk information such as data breach incidents. These indications motivated us to examine the effect of an unexplored factor, that is, data breach publicity (DBR) on ISA. The purpose of this research is to discover if DBR significantly improves a model's ability to predict ISA and its magnitude in influencing ISA. A 3-stage hierarchical linear regression approach was used to build up the model with prior known influential factors to predict ISA. To the extent of our knowledge, there is no study reported to date regarding the implication of DBR on ISA. Our main findings reveal that DBR significantly explains 6.7% of ISA and achieves the highest coefficient comparing with prior known factors. Our research contributes to a novel discovery of a new factor that significantly influences ISA and its magnitude in increasing ISA. This discovery implies the need to incorporate the knowledge of data breach incidents into ISA-related educative programs or strategies to increase ISA.

Examining the effect of different knowledge aspects on information security awareness

“…Hwang et al (2019) investigated how ISA leads to improved information security compliance behavior and found that it is crucial to invigorate awareness before any behavioral changes could happen. Siponen (2000) and Khan et al (2011) also supported that awareness is the first step to information security behavioral change, which would require more than providing information about security risks via campaigns (Bada et al , 2019) because individuals are driven by different knowledge through factors such as experience (Jaeger and Eckhardt, 2021), security warnings (Jaeger and Eckhardt, 2021) and data breach publicity (Chua et al , 2021b). Since individual knowledge influences attitude and intention to change security-related behavior (Bada et al , 2019; Chin and Chua, 2021; Jaeger and Eckhardt, 2021), it is crucial to have conceptual and procedural understanding of ISA (Khan et al , 2011; Siponen, 2000).…”

“…Moody et al (2018) urged that ISA, through educational campaigns or training, should include knowledge related to information technology security threats, their consequences and the protective actions to remove them. Furthermore, Chua et al (2021b) found that individuals who received more data breach news (that may invoke fear) will have higher ISA. Therefore, we hypothesize that fear will affect one's ISA: H5.…”

A Novel Digital Forensic Framework for Data Breach Investigation

“…In addition, the massive impact of data breaches involves internal and external consequences for the organization [4]. Internal consequences affect the breached organization in terms of operations [5], [6], workforce [7]- [9], legal issues [10], [11], and finance [12], [13]; external consequences affect customers [14]- [16], competitors [17], [18], suppliers [19]- [21], and other stakeholders [22]. As an example of financial impacts, according to a report by IBM, global losses from data breach incidents increased from USD 3.86 billion in 2020 to USD 4.24 billion in 2021 [23] and USD 4.35 billion in 2022 [24].…”

Increasing Cyber Defense in the Music Education Sector Using Blockchain Zero-Knowledge Proof Identification

“…In recent years, cloud computing has been widely used in many areas of everyday life, mainly for data storage [1,2].…”

“…In recent years, cloud computing has been widely used in many areas of everyday life, mainly for data storage [ 1 , 2 ]. This raises questions about the reliability and how to manage the data in question.…”