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Auditory icons are naturally occurring sounds that systems play to convey information. Systems must convey complex messages. To do so, systems can play: 1) a single sound that represents the entire message, or 2) a single sound that represents the first part of the message, followed by another sound that represents the next part of that message, etc. The latter are known as concatenated auditory icons. To evaluate those approaches, participants interpreted single and concatenated auditory icons designed to convey their message well and poorly. Single auditory icons designed to convey their message well were correctly interpreted more often than those designed to convey their message poorly; that was not true for concatenated auditory icons. Concatenated auditory icons should not be comprised of a series of sounds that each represents its piece of a message well. The whole of a concatenated auditory icon is not the sum of its parts. 

The use of metaphor in cybersecurity discourse has become a topic of interest because of its ability to aid communication about abstract security concepts. In this paper, we borrow from existing metaphor identification algorithms and general theories to create a lightweight metaphor identification algorithm, which uses only one external source of knowledge. The algorithm also introduces a real time corpus builder for extracting collocates; this is, identifying words that appear together more frequently than chance. We implement several variations of the introduced algorithm and empirically evaluate the output using the TroFi dataset, a de facto evaluation dataset in metaphor research. We find first, contrary to our expectation, that adding word sense disambiguation to our metaphor identification algorithm decreases its performance. Second, we find, that our lightweight algorithms perform comparably to their existing, more complex, counterparts. Finally, we present the results of several case studies to observe the utility of the algorithm for future research in linguistic metaphor identification in text related to cybersecurity texts and threats.

 

Purpose Nonexperts do not always follow the advice in cybersecurity warning messages. To increase compliance, it is recommended that warning messages use nontechnical language, describe how the cyberattack will affect the user personally and do so in a way that aligns with how the user thinks about cyberattacks. Implementing those recommendations requires an understanding of how nonexperts think about cyberattack consequences. Unfortunately, research has yet to reveal nonexperts’ thinking about cyberattack consequences. Toward that end, the purpose of this study was to examine how nonexperts think about cyberattack consequences. Design/methodology/approach Nonexperts sorted cyberattack consequences based on perceived similarity and labeled each group based on the reason those grouped consequences were perceived to be similar. Participants’ labels were analyzed to understand the general themes and the specific features that are present in nonexperts’ thinking. Findings The results suggested participants mainly thought about cyberattack consequences in terms of what the attacker is doing and what will be affected. Further, the results suggested participants thought about certain aspects of the consequences in concrete terms and other aspects of the consequences in general terms. Originality/value This research illuminates how nonexperts think about cyberattack consequences. This paper also reveals what aspects of nonexperts’ thinking are more or less concrete and identifies specific terminology that can be used to describe aspects that fall into each case. Such information allows one to align warning messages to nonexperts’ thinking in more nuanced ways than would otherwise be possible. 

Phishing attack countermeasures have previously relied on technical solutions or user training. As phishing attacks continue to impact users resulting in adverse consequences, mitigation efforts may be strengthened through an understanding of how user characteristics predict phishing susceptibility. Several studies have identified factors of interest that may contribute to susceptibility. Others have begun to build predictive models to better understand the relationships among factors in addition to their prediction power, although these studies have only used a handful of predictors. As a step toward creating a holistic model to predict phishing susceptibility, it was first necessary to catalog all known predictors that have been identified in the literature. We identified 32 predictors related to personality traits, demographics, educational background, cybersecurity experience and beliefs, platform experience, email behaviors, and work commitment style. 

Phishing emails have certain characteristics, including wording related to urgency and unrealistic promises (i.e., “too good to be true”), that attempt to lure victims. To test whether these characteristics affected users’ suspiciousness of emails, users participated in a phishing judgment task in which we manipulated 1) email type (legitimate, phishing), 2) consequence amount (small, medium, large), 3) consequence type (gain, loss), and 4) urgency (present, absent). We predicted users would be most suspicious of phishing emails that were urgent and offered large gains. Results supporting the hypotheses indicate that users were more suspicious of phishing emails with a gain consequence type or large consequence amount. However, urgency was not a significant predictor of suspiciousness for phishing emails, but was for legitimate emails. These results have important cybersecurity-related implications for penetration testing and user training.