Examining Cybersecurity Attitudes and Behaviors of Very Attacked People within a Hybrid Workforce

Understanding individuals' attitudes towards cybersecurity and their performance of risky cyber behavior is essential to understanding the problem of cybersecurity. Technology cannot protect everyone from every cyber threat. If an individual is willing to engage in risky cyber behavior such as sharing personal information online, sharing passwords with friends, or placing their current location on social media, protective technologies are bypassed. At the start of the 2020 pandemic, many organizations worldwide moved into a remote work, or hybrid working environment, (O'Reardon, 2020). Organizations and individuals experienced new cybersecurity threats because of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic (Kim, 2021). Not only did threat actors use COVID-19 as a subject line in phishing emails (Ramadad, 2021) but individuals home computers used to work remotely may be using technology that is past the end of life, missing security patches, have old anti-malware definitions (Retnowardhani, 2019). This study aims to better understand the perceived cybersecurity challenges when working remotely as well as if there is a relationship between attitudes towards cybersecurity and the self-reported risky cyber behavior. Most organizations, like most people, do not have an unlimited amount of resources, time or money. Focusing limited resources on the biggest risks will benefit all. In this study, the population is limited to those individuals identified as being attacked more frequently than other individuals.