Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Policy Studies

Committee Chair/Advisor

Dr. Lori Dickes

Committee Member

Dr. Bart Knijnenberg

Committee Member

Dr. Jeffrey Peake

Committee Member

Dr. Vaiva Kalesnikaite

Abstract

Amid a landscape of cyber attacks on America occurring below the threshold of armed conflict, strategic national policy efforts recommend a whole-of-nation approach where individuals and public and private organizations increase their defensive posture in cyberspace. Motivation to address the risk of a cyber event includes a continuum of cyber threats that can range from low-level disruptive events to cybercrime and cyber espionage to the possibility of a potentially catastrophic attack on critical infrastructure. In this dissertation, I conduct a survey experiment of various cyber threat conditions and cyber policies to model cybersecurity responses, risk perceptions to a possible cyber disaster, and the perceived effectiveness of organizational cyber policy. To achieve this objective, I offer three papers. In chapter two, I use an experimental approach to review the effect of different cyber threat conditions on risk perception and cybersecurity response. In chapter three, I apply a psychological risk perception framework towards the modeling of willingness to use individual cybersecurity privacy tools. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I use a fusion of expected utility models of protection motivation theory and the theory of planned behavior to model attitudes and intentions to comply with organizational cybersecurity policy while including policy and threat conditions.

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