Predicting individual differences to cyber attacks: Knowledge, arousal, emotional and trust responses

Cyber attacks are increasingly commonplace and cause significant disruption, and therefore, have been a focus of much research. The objective of this research was to understand the factors that might lead users to fail to recognize red flags and succumb to cyber events. We investigated users’ knowledge of cyber attacks, their propensity to trust technology, arousal, emotional valence, and situational trust in response to different types and severity of cyber attacks. Our findings suggest that high-risk attacks elicited more arousal and more negative emotional valence than low-risk attacks. The attack-type manipulation revealed that phishing scenarios yielded distinctive patterns, including weaker affective responses than ransomware and other malware. The authors further examined arousal, emotional valence, and situational trust patterns among the subset of high- knowledge participants who successfully identified all the attacks and compared these responses with those of less knowledgeable peers. Our findings suggest that the more knowledgeable the user, the higher was their general propensity to trust technology, the more sensitive were their emotional responses to the manipulation of risk, and the lower their situational trust when faced with cyber attack scenarios.