Search Results (2)

The cyberspace depicts an increasing number of difficulties related to security, especially in healthcare. This is evident from how vulnerable critical infrastructures are to cyberattacks and are unprotected against cybercrime. Users, ideally, should maintain a good level of cyber hygiene, via regular software updates and the development of unique passwords, as an effective way to become resilient to cyberattacks. Cyber security breaches are a top priority, and most users are aware that their behaviours may put them at risk; however, they are not educated to follow best practices, such as protecting their passwords. Mass cyber education may serve as a means to offset poor cyber security behaviours; however, mandatory education becomes a questionable point if the content is not focused on human factors, using human-centric approaches and taking into account end users’ behaviours, which is currently the case. The nature of the present paper is largely exploratory, and the purpose is two-fold: To present and explore the cyber hygiene definition, context and habits of end users in order to strengthen our understanding of users. Our paper reports the best practices that should be used by healthcare organisations and healthcare professionals to maintain good cyber hygiene and how these can be applied via a healthcare use case scenario to increase awareness related to data privacy and cybersecurity. This is an issue of great importance and urgency considering the rapid increase of cyberattacks in healthcare organisations, mainly due to human errors. Further to that, based on human-centric approaches, our long-term vision and future work involves facilitating the development of efficient practices and education associated with cybersecurity hygiene via a flexible, adaptable and practical framework. Full article

Password hygiene plays an essential part in securing systems protected with single-factor authentication. A significant fraction of security incidents happen due to weak or reused passwords. The reasons behind differences in security vulnerable behaviour between various user groups remains an active research topic. The paper aims to identify the impact of age and gender on password strength using a large password dataset. We recovered previously hashed passwords of 102,120 users from a leaked customer database of a car-sharing company. Although the measured effect size was small, males significantly had stronger passwords than females for all age groups. Males aged 26–45 were also significantly different from all other groups, and password complexity decreased with age for both genders equally. Overall, very weak password hygiene was observed, 72% of users based their password on a word or used a simple sequence of digits, and passwords of over 39% of users were found in word lists of previous leaks. Full article