A Novel Approach to the Behavioral Aspects of Cybersecurity

The Internet and cyberspace are inseparable aspects of everyone's life. Cyberspace is a concept that describes widespread, interconnected, and online digital technology. Cyberspace refers to the online world that is separate from everyday reality. Since the internet is a recent advance in human lives, there are many unknown and unpredictable aspects to it that sometimes can be catastrophic to users in financial aspects, high-tech industry, and healthcare. Cybersecurity failures are usually caused by human errors or their lack of knowledge. According to the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) X-Force Threat Intelligence Index in 2020, around 8.5 billion records were compromised in 2019 due to failures of insiders, which is an increase of more than 200 percent compared to the compromised records in 2018. In another survey performed by the Ernst and Young Global Information Security during 2018-2019, it is reported that 34% of the organizations stated that employees who are inattentive or do not have the necessary knowledge are the principal vulnerabilities of cybersecurity, and 22% of the organizations indicated that phishing is the main threat to them. Inattentive users are one of the reasons for data breaches and cyberattacks. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the United Kingdom observed that 23.2 million users who were victims of cybersecurity attacks used a carelessly selected password, which is 123456, as their account password. The Annual Cybersecurity Report published by Cisco in 2018 announced that phishing and spear phishing emails are the root causes of many cybersecurity attacks in recent years. Hence, enhancing the cybersecurity behaviors of both personal users and organizations can protect vulnerable users from cyber threats. Both human factors and technological aspects of cybersecurity should be addressed in organizations for a safer environment.