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The Impact Of Information Security Threat Awareness On Privacy-Protective Behaviors, Stanislav Mamonov, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this study, we examine how to motivate computer users to protect themselves from potential security and privacy threats. We draw on the Information Processing framework which posits that threat mitigation commonly occurs before full cognitive threat assessment and we conduct an empirical study to evaluate the effects of an exposure to general information security threats on the strength of passwords and the disclosure of personal information. Through an online experiment, we compare immediate computer user reactions to potential non-individually specific security and privacy threats in an extra-organizational context. We find evidence consistent with automatic security and privacy protective actions …