Standing out among the daily spam: How to catch website owners' attention by means of vulnerability notifications

Abstract

Running a business without having a website is nearly impossible nowadays. Most business owners use content managements systems to manage their websites. Yet, those can pose security risks and provide vulnerabilities for manipulations. With vulnerability notifications, website owners are notified about security risks. To identify common themes with respect to vulnerability notifications and provide deeper insight into the motivations of website owners to react to those notifications, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews. In compliance with previous research, we could confirm that distrust in unexpected notifications is high and, in contrast to previous research, we suggest that verification possibilities are the most important factors to establish trust in notifications. We also endorse the findings that raising awareness for the severity and the complexity of the problems is crucial to increase remediation rates.