Cyber hygiene knowledge, awareness, and behavioral practices of university students

Abstract

ABSTRACT Personal data is valuable and vulnerable to individuals who have wrong intentions as any other possessions. This can be mitigated by good cyber hygiene habits. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate, analyze, and understand the level of cyber hygiene knowledge, awareness, and behavioral practices of university students and their mutual relations. We have conducted a survey study containing 30 cyber hygiene questions. Results show that students have acceptable cyber hygiene behavior, but their awareness is not satisfactory, and their knowledge is quite low. Also, the study shows the existence of some relations between gender and current education level and cyber hygiene knowledge, awareness, and behavior, as well as mutual interplay and relations between those cyber hygiene outcomes. The main contributions of this work are bidirectional: theoretical and practical.