Cybersecurity Awareness, Education, and Workplace Training Using Socially Enabled Intelligent Chatbots

Abstract

Over the past ten years, chatbot technology has become a burgeoning field within AI, finding practical applications in sectors such as banking, customer service, medicine, education, and e-commerce. Nevertheless, the use of intelligent agents in cybersecurity needs to be more extensive. Recently, most research in cybersecurity has focused more and more on detecting malicious activities automatically. Unfortunately, few works focused on how the human factor can result in such attacks. Human-induced attacks and errors are found to be either unintentional or intentional. The first type, our focus, can result from lacking training and cyber awareness. Attackers use different tactics to lure victims into unsafe behaviors, leading to potential personal blackmail, ransomware attacks, or data breaches through phishing emails. Usually, to address the problem mentioned above, universities, employers, and organizations provide cyber awareness education. However, the problem is that the training is a one-time process and does not provide the necessary continuing support and education. As a result, people usually find themselves in a situation where they need specific advice before engaging in a particular activity. Sometimes, they might need someone to alert them to a suspicious email, fishy link, or abnormal attachment. In response, in this study, we discuss the integration of chatbots with social networking for cybersecurity public awareness, education, and workplace training. We focus on utilizing chatbots as social, collaborative agents to protect users against cyber-attacks. The chatbots provide continuous support to users by providing immediate answers and advice on what to do in various threatening situations. In addition, admin users add training material remotely into chatbots, and users can view and answer interactive questions to ensure they are up-to-date regarding cyber awareness.