Cybersecurity threat and incident managers in large organizations, especially in the financial sector, are confronted more and more with an increase in volume and complexity of threats and incidents. At the same time, these managers have to deal with many internal processes and criteria, in addition to requirements from external parties, such as regulators that pose an additional challenge to handling threats and incidents. Little research has been carried out to understand to what extent decision support can aid these professionals in managing threats and incidents. The purpose of this research was to develop decision support for cybersecurity threat and incident managers in the financial sector. To this end, we carried out a cognitive task analysis and the first two phases of a cognitive work analysis, based on two rounds of in-depth interviews with ten professionals from three financial institutions. Our results show that decision support should address the problem of balancing the bigger picture with details. That is, being able to simultaneously keep the broader operational context in mind as well as adequately investigating, containing and remediating a cyberattack. In close consultation with the three financial institutions involved, we developed a critical-thinking memory aid that follows typical incident response process steps, but adds big picture elements and critical thinking steps. This should make cybersecurity threat and incident managers more aware of the broader operational implications of threats and incidents while keeping a critical mindset. Although a summative evaluation was beyond the scope of the present research, we conducted iterative formative evaluations of the memory aid that show its potential.
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Attack surfaces are increasing as products are increasingly more connected. This has been acknowledged by the European Commission in their Europe: fit for the digital age strategy and in recent legislative proposals. Most importantly, the proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) sets minimum cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements. These requirements range from effective and regular tests to the dissemination of free security updates in case of a cybersecurity breach. This should ensure a base level of cybersecurity throughout the product’s lifetime. Unfortunately, there is a catch: not all products with digital elements fall within the scope of the proposed CRA. For instance, vehicles are not subject to the proposed Act. The exclusion of this category of products with digital elements seems to be based on the premise that ‘the sectoral rules achieve the same level of protection as the one provided for by this Regulation’ (recital 14). This contribution is challenging this premise, as it explores the level of cybersecurity as laid down in the proposed CRA and compares it to the level of cybersecurity ensured by the sectoral rules in vehicle regulation. Could this mean that your smartphone is going to be more cybersecure than your car?
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In general, people are poorly protected against cyberthreats, with the main reason being user behaviour. For the study described in this paper, a ques-tionnaire was developed in order to understand how people’s knowledge of and attitude towards both cyberthreats and cyber security controls affect in-tention to adopt cybersecure behaviour. The study divides attitude into a cog-nitive and an affective component. Although only the cognitive component of attitude is usually studied, the results from a questionnaire of 300 respond-ents show that both the affective and cognitive components of attitude have a clearly positive, albeit varying, influence on behavioural intention, with the affective component having an even greater effect on attitude than the cog-nitive aspect. No correlation was found between knowledge and behavioural intention. The results indicate that attitude is an important factor to include when developing behavioural interventions, but also that different kinds of attitude should be addressed differently in interventions.
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