Cover
Vol. 20 No. 1 (2024)

Published: June 30, 2024

Pages: 58-67

Original Article

Measuring Individuals Cybersecurity Awareness Based on Demographic Features

Idrees A. Zahid 1 Samir Alaa Hussein Shakir Mahmood Mahdi 2
1Information Technology Center, University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq
2Division of Graduate Studies, University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq
History
  • Received: April 20, 2023
  • Revised: June 8, 2023
  • Accepted: June 28, 2023
  • Available Online: October 28, 2023
DOI

https://doi.org/10.37917/ijeee.20.1.6

Abstract

Cybersecurity awareness has a huge impact on individuals and an even bigger impact on firms, universities, and institutes to those individuals belong. Consequently, it is essential to explore and asses the factors affecting the awareness level of cybersecurity. More specifically this research study examines the impact of demographic features of individuals on cybersecurity awareness. The Studied literature’s limitations have been addressed and overcome in our research from the variability, and ambiguity aspects. A questionnaire was developed and responses were collected from 613 participants. Reliability and validity tests as well as correlations have been applied for the instruments and data employed in this study. Coefficients were calculated via multiple linear regression for the weights of each of the cybersecurity components. Data reliability test showed that Cronbach’s Alpha value of 0.707 for the used data which is acceptable for research purposes. Results analysis showed r-value for each of the questions is greater than the r table which was 0.07992. Examining the proposed hypotheses showed that there is a difference as the null hypothesis is rejected for one of the demographic features being tested namely, gender. While there is no significant difference when it comes to the other two factors, education level, and age. Using the weight for each of the components, password security, technical behavior, and social influence could provide a solid base for decision-makers to focus on and implement the available resources for gender-specific developments to raise the cybersecurity awareness level..

Keywords

References

  1. S. Venkatesha, K. R. Reddy, and B. Chandavarkar, “So- cial engineering attacks during the covid-19 pandemic,” SN computer science, vol. 2, pp. 1–9, 2021.
  2. A. Farooq, J. Isoaho, S. Virtanen, and J. Isoaho, “Infor- mation security awareness in educational institution: An analysis of students’ individual factors,” in 2015 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, vol. 1, pp. 352–359, IEEE, 2015.
  3. A. Alshamrani, S. Myneni, A. Chowdhary, and D. Huang, “A survey on advanced persistent threats: Techniques, solutions, challenges, and research oppor- tunities,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 1851–1877, 2019.
  4. A. K. Jain, S. R. Sahoo, and J. Kaubiyal, “Online social networks security and privacy: comprehensive review and analysis,” Complex & Intelligent Systems, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 2157–2177, 2021.
  5. S. M. Kennison, I. T. Jones, V. H. Spooner, and D. E. Chan-Tin, “Who creates strong passwords when nudging fails,” Computers in Human Behavior Reports, vol. 4, p. 100132, 2021.
  6. I. Mugarza, J. L. Flores, and J. L. Montero, “Security issues and software updates management in the indus- trial internet of things (iiot) era,” Sensors, vol. 20, no. 24, p. 7160, 2020.
  7. F. L. Greitzer, W. Li, K. B. Laskey, J. Lee, and J. Purl, “Experimental investigation of technical and human fac- tors related to phishing susceptibility,” ACM Transac- tions on Social Computing, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1–48, 2021.
  8. I. M. Venter, R. J. Blignaut, K. Renaud, and M. A. Venter, “Cyber security education is as essential as “the three r’s”,” Heliyon, vol. 5, no. 12, 2019.
  9. S. Wolf, A. C. Burrows, M. Borowczak, M. Johnson, R. Cooley, and K. Mogenson, “Integrated outreach: In- creasing engagement in computer science and cyber- security,” Education Sciences, vol. 10, no. 12, p. 353, 2020.
  10. A. Withanaarachchi and N. Vithana, “Female underrep- resentation in the cybersecurity workforce–a study on cybersecurity professionals in sri lanka,” Information & Computer Security, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 402–421, 2022.
  11. D. Van Der Linden, O. A. Michalec, and A. Zamansky, “Cybersecurity for smart farming: socio-cultural con- text matters,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 28–35, 2020.
  12. R. Van Bavel, N. Rodr´ıguez-Priego, J. Vila, and P. Briggs, “Using protection motivation theory in the design of nudges to improve online security behav- ior,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 123, pp. 29–39, 2019.
  13. A. Alzubaidi, “Measuring the level of cyber-security awareness for cybercrime in saudi arabia,” Heliyon, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021.
  14. L. Zhang-Kennedy and S. Chiasson, “A systematic review of multimedia tools for cybersecurity aware- ness and education,” ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2021.
  15. S. Tirumala, M. R. Valluri, and G. Babu, “A survey on cybersecurity awareness concerns, practices and con- ceptual measures,” in 2019 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), pp. 1–6, IEEE, 2019.
  16. H. Aldawood and G. Skinner, “Educating and raising awareness on cyber security social engineering: A lit- erature review,” in 2018 IEEE international conference on teaching, assessment, and learning for engineering (TALE), pp. 62–68, IEEE, 2018.
  17. T. Alharbi and A. Tassaddiq, “Assessment of cybersecu- rity awareness among students of majmaah university,” Big Data and Cognitive Computing, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 23, 2021.
  18. Y. Nidup, “Awareness about the online security threat and ways to secure the youths,” Journal of Cybersecurity, vol. 3, no. 3, p. 133, 2021. 67 | Zahid, Hussein & Mahdi
  19. M. A. Alqahtani et al., “Cybersecurity awareness based on software and e-mail security with statistical analysis,” Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, vol. 2022, 2022.
  20. B. Bulgurcu, H. Cavusoglu, and I. Benbasat, “Informa- tion security policy compliance: an empirical study of rationality-based beliefs and information security aware- ness,” MIS quarterly, pp. 523–548, 2010.
  21. W. R. Flores and M. Ekstedt, “Shaping intention to resist social engineering through transformational leadership, information security culture and awareness,” Computers & security, vol. 59, pp. 26–44, 2016.