Investing in Prevention or Paying for Recovery - Attitudes to Cyber Risk

Abstract

Broadly speaking an individual can invest time and effort to avoid becoming victim to a cyber attack and/or they can invest resource in recovering from any attack. We introduce a new game called the prevention and recovery game to study this trade-off. We report results from the experimental lab that allow us to categorize different approaches to risk taking. We show that many individuals appear relatively risk loving in that they invest in recovery rather than prevention. We find little difference in behavior between a gain and loss framing.