Development of a new ‘human cyber-resilience scale’

Abstract

While there has been an upsurge in interest in cyber resilience in organizations, we know little about the resilience of individuals to cyber attacks. Cyber resilience in a domestic or non-work setting is important because we know that the majority of people will face cyber threats in their use of technology across a range of contexts, and the ability to resist a cyber attack, or quickly recover and learn from a successful attack, is as important for individuals’ wellbeing as it is for organizations. There is, unfortunately, a dearth of studies on the cyber resilience of people, in part because it is not clear how such a construct could be defined and then measured. In the present work, we present a series of five studies—with a total sample of n = 1503—that sought to develop and validate a theoretically based measure of cyber resilience for individuals. The final scale, comprising 16 items and 4 subscales (self-efficacy, learning and growth, social support, and helplessness), demonstrates good internal reliability and validity.