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Raising Cybersecurity Awareness Through Electronic Word of Mouth: A Data-Driven Assessment

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Augmented Cognition (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14019))

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Abstract

Awareness of the many cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities, and solutions to mitigate these threats/vulnerabilities is instrumental in improving basic cybersecurity behaviours. A healthy body of knowledge has been devoted to exploring how to better increase awareness, in any given topic, among members of the general public which have explored the role of word of mouth (WOM) and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) in spreading awareness. In recent years, the rise of social media platforms as an alternative communication channel has created efforts to promote cybersecurity awareness online regarding the numerous cybersecurity threats. However, little research attention has been devoted to exploring eWOM communication on social media surrounding cybersecurity awareness. Moreover, no research to date has considered the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these eWOM discussions related to cybersecurity awareness. To address these literature gaps, this research collected 227, 270 relevant tweets surrounding cybersecurity awareness from 2018 to 2022 conducting an exploratory analysis of the corpus using social network analyses, topic modelling and semantic similarity analysis. The results found topics rose in prominence and then dissipated as newer topics emerged while information was found to spread incredibly far despite a high degree of community forming, suggesting the online discourse is very open and evolving over time. These findings illustrate the potential of social media as an effective tool for raising cybersecurity awareness. The impact of COVID-19 observed an increase in the reach of information in addition to new specific topics emerging in the discourse, but the effects appear to be temporary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cybersecurity Research Lab (CRL), Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Dane Vanderkooi, Mohamad Sadegh Sangari & Atefeh Mashatan

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  1. Dane Vanderkooi
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  2. Mohamad Sadegh Sangari
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  3. Atefeh Mashatan
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Correspondence to Atefeh Mashatan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Soar Technology Inc., Orlando, FL, USA

    Dylan D. Schmorrow

  2. Katmai Government Services, Orlando, FL, USA

    Cali M. Fidopiastis

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Vanderkooi, D., Sangari, M.S., Mashatan, A. (2023). Raising Cybersecurity Awareness Through Electronic Word of Mouth: A Data-Driven Assessment. In: Schmorrow, D.D., Fidopiastis, C.M. (eds) Augmented Cognition. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35017-7_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35017-7_30

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