Wednesday 12 April 2023, 11am-12noon (BST)

Existing work in the cybersecurity field has primarily been focussed on raising security awareness by ‘fear appeals’ as a means to change behaviour, and there has been little work on the role of personalisation. Together with poorly understood barriers to security behaviour change, they have led to fairly generic ‘one-size-fits-all’ informational campaigns that do not serve people effectively.

The challenge with any approach that uses personalisation is ensuring that it uses the correct factors and logic to determine what to personalise. Guided by theoretical and evidence-based research, CybSafe has assessed common barriers to security behaviour change using the National Cyber Security Centre’s key behaviours for staying safe online. The Capability, Opportunity and Motivation – Behaviour (COM-B) model was used as the base framework. They examined a range of individual factors that could be used for potential personalisation and applied behaviour change techniques (BCTs) for digital intervention.

In this presentation, Dr Inka Karpinnen covered key personalisation factors, shed light on the development of digital interventions, and shared both qualitative and quantitative results of interventions’ effectiveness.

CybSafe’s year-long project has helped to inform what personalisation factors and techniques could be used within security awareness and training at an individual level. These learnings could also be implemented at an organisational level by cybersecurity professionals informing their awareness and training programmes.

Guest chaired by

Dr Robert Coles (info), Non-Executive Director, Chair and advisor of various boards

Presented by

Dr Inka Karpinnen (info), Lead Behavioural Scientist, CybSafe