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The exponential growth of digital content has generated massive textual datasets, necessitating the use of advanced analytical approaches. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as tools that are capable of processing and extracting insights from massive unstructured textual datasets. However, how to leverage LLMs for text analytics Information Systems (IS) research is currently unclear. To assist the IS community in understanding how to operationalize LLMs, we propose a Text Analytics for Information Systems Research (TAISR) framework. Our proposed framework provides detailed recommendations grounded in IS and LLM literature on how to conduct meaningful text analytics IS research for design science, behavioral, and econometric streams. We conducted three business intelligence case studies using our TAISR framework to demonstrate its application in several IS research contexts. We also outline the potential challenges and limitations of adopting LLMs for IS. By offering a systematic approach and evidence of its utility, our TAISR framework contributes to future IS research streams looking to incorporate powerful LLMs for text analytics. 

The increasing societal concern for consumer information privacy has led to the enforcement of privacy regulations worldwide. In an effort to adhere to privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), many companies’ privacy policies have become increasingly lengthy and complex. In this study, we adopted the computational design science paradigm to design a novel privacy policy evolution analytics framework to help identify how companies change and present their privacy policies based on privacy regulations. The framework includes a self-attentive annotation system (SAAS) that automatically annotates paragraph-length segments in privacy policies to help stakeholders identify data practices of interest for further investigation. We rigorously evaluated SAAS against state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL)-based methods on a well-established privacy policy dataset, OPP-115. SAAS outperformed conventional ML and DL models in terms of F1-score by statistically significant margins. We demonstrate the proposed framework’s practical utility with an in-depth case study of GDPR’s impact on Amazon’s privacy policies. The case study results indicate that Amazon’s post-GDPR privacy policy potentially violates a fundamental principle of GDPR by causing consumers to exert more effort to find information about first-party data collection. Given the increasing importance of consumer information privacy, the proposed framework has important implications for regulators and companies. We discuss several design principles followed by the SAAS that can help guide future design science-based e-commerce, health, and privacy research. 

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage can lead to identity theft, financial loss, reputation damage, and anxiety. However, individuals remain largely unaware of their PII exposure on the Internet, and whether providing individuals with information about the extent of their PII exposure can trigger privacy protection actions requires further investigation. In this pilot study, grounded by Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), we examine whether receiving privacy alerts in the form of threat and countermeasure information will trigger senior citizens to engage in protective behaviors. We also examine whether providing personalized information moderates the relationship between information and individuals' perceptions. We contribute to the literature by shedding light on the determinants and barriers to adopting privacy protection behaviors. 

The rapid proliferation of complex information systems has been met by an ever-increasing quantity of exploits that can cause irreparable cyber breaches. To mitigate these cyber threats, academia and industry have placed a significant focus on proactively identifying and labeling exploits developed by the international hacker community. However, prevailing approaches for labeling exploits in hacker forums do not leverage metadata from exploit darknet markets or public exploit repositories to enhance labeling performance. In this study, we adopted the computational design science paradigm to develop a novel information technology artifact, the deep transfer learning exploit labeler (DTL-EL). DTL-EL incorporates a pre-initialization design, multi-layer deep transfer learning (DTL), and a self-attention mechanism to automatically label exploits in hacker forums. We rigorously evaluated the proposed DTL-EL against state-of-the-art non-DTL benchmark methods based in classical machine learning and deep learning. Results suggest that the proposed DTL-EL significantly outperforms benchmark methods based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Our proposed DTL-EL framework provides important practical implications for key stakeholders such as cybersecurity managers, analysts, and educators. 

Adversarial Malware Generation (AMG), the generation of adversarial malware variants to strengthen Deep Learning (DL)-based malware detectors has emerged as a crucial tool in the development of proactive cyberdefense. However, the majority of extant works offer subtle perturbations or additions to executable files and do not explore full-file obfuscation. In this study, we show that an open-source encryption tool coupled with a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework can successfully obfuscate malware to evade state-of-the-art malware detection engines and outperform techniques that use advanced modification methods. Our results show that the proposed method improves the evasion rate from 27%-49% compared to widely-used state-of-the-art reinforcement learning-based methods.