Abstract
Usability of antivirus (AV) tools has not received much attention yet. We conducted a laboratory study with 34 German students to investigate how they experience notifications and interventions of their AV when a threat is detected. During the study, a specifically designed harmless file triggered AV on participants’ laptops. Out of 34 participants, 19 users noticed AV messages, and 8 of them understood that the message communicated threat detection concerning a specific file. Moreover, only 6 users understood that this file was removed by the AV tool. Additionally, most participants were distracted by Windows OS messages that were unintelligible to them. We investigate reasons for incomprehension in our sample, and give recommendations for improved user interaction design of AV tools.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Due to a collision of several unfortunate circumstances, the research team found resources for writing up the results only in 2021.
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None of the participants felt frightened or blamed us for the unsafe USB drive. All participants called us if they could not proceed with the task.
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If the participants could not use their own laptop (e.g., they forgot to bring it, or had technical issues), they used a “fallback” laptop with Windows 10 and the AV tool Sophos. Our university requires Sophos on university computers.
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Four participants that used the fallback computer are excluded from these analyses.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Thilo Voigt for essential support in conducting the user study, Katrin Proschek for support in the usability lab and for the idea of the cover story, Martin Ortlieb and Stefan Brandenburg for help with study design, Stella Wohnig for assistance with data analysis, the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, and Simone Fischer-Hübner for shepherding.
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Körber, M., Kalysch, A., Massonne, W., Benenson, Z. (2022). Usability of Antivirus Tools in a Threat Detection Scenario. In: Meng, W., Fischer-Hübner, S., Jensen, C.D. (eds) ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection. SEC 2022. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 648. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06975-8_18
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