From Cybersecurity Hygiene to Cyber Well-Being

Abstract

End-user practices are widely recognized as a source of cybersecurity weaknesses, and yet efforts to support related awareness and understanding are often lacking in both the workplace and wider societal contexts. As a result, users are often expected to be cybersecurity-literate and to follow good cyber hygiene practices, without necessarily having an understanding or sufficient guidance on how to do so. This can be down to the fact that mainstream advice surrounding the definition for cyber hygiene is widely used but varies greatly in meaning- therefore can create confusion on what the user should prioritize. This paper investigates and defines the concept of cyber hygiene and uses this foundation as the basis for considering the notion of Cyber Well-being as a positive state that ought to be fostered amongst the user community. Rather than simply adopting the oft-taken stance that the user is a threat to technology, the aim behind Cyber Well-being is to consider the users’ feelings as well as what they do to implement cyber hygiene. A total of 165 respondents were involved in order to understand varying interpretations of what good cyber hygiene looks like. A disconnect between theory and practice were apparent from later responses when respondents were asked about the issues that stood in the way of their cyber hygiene. The discussion also proposes how the findings can form the foundation for an accompanying tool that can assist users in practicing and tracking their cyber hygiene and may thereby foster confidence and support the formation of Cyber Well-being in their use of their technologies.