Jaden Evans

CYSE 201S

Professor Aslan

9 February 2024

 Article Review #1: How COVID-19 Left Its Impact on Cybersecurity

Introduction

The article I chose is from the Journal of Cybersecurity titled “Cybersecurity when working from home during COVID-19: considering the human factors” (Whitty, 2024).   In the abstract and introduction it is made clear that the pandemic is used as an example to inform companies and policy makers that events that necessitate a major change in people’s lives and the technology they choose impact their psychology.  It is this psychological impact and stress that makes it harder for employees to enact proper safety protocols which raises their risk of victimization.  This concept ties into one of the points of the Module 4 being victim precipitation.

Methods

This article uses data from both before the pandemic and after the pandemic to compare the cybersecurity standards of companies and how COVID-19 increased the risks through psychological factors such as stress and getting used to the new working standard.  They used multiple studies and surveys to answer the following research questions: How did the transition from the office to home impact the employees and their cybersecurity behaviours?  What did the participants learn from cybersecurity while working at home?  And what could the article suggest to companies based on their findings? Their method to answer these questions revolved mainly around using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a method to determine the psychological impact on the participants’ lives and then pooled this data together to provide a statistical analysis.  Participants were all Australian, mostly male, and ranged from 25 to 72 years of age providing a diverse group to study to keep minority and marginalized groups in the scope of research.

Connections

As previously mentioned, this article deals with studying how the pandemic affected workers to find what policies should be put in place to ensure cybersecurity standards in the post-pandemic world.  This can be viewed as a form of victim precipitation, understanding why people become victims to help prevent future victimization (Yalpi, 4).  The problems of having untrained workers using unfamiliar or old technology while surrounded by family such as children and having to share data in potentially insecure locations with bad internet quality heavily contributed to the diversity of risks the wide range of participants experienced (Yalpi, 2).

Conclusion

This article aims to provide real world context on why social science and psychology should be considered an important factor to companies’ cybersecurity risks by analyzing how real world experiences such as the COVID-19.  Their points correlate to many of the weekly slide modules of this course as is very apparent in Table 2.  Here the authors emphasize the importance of employee’s mental states, the importance of having employees learn proper cybersecurity behaviours, for the companies to be aware of the technological limitations of working from home, and to avoid blaming the victims/ workers.  Overall this article perfectly encapsulates the concepts of this course so far while relating it to a still relevant and generation-defining event that was the COVID-19 pandemic.

References

Whitty, M. T., Moustafa, N., & Grobler, M. (2024). Cybersecurity when working from home during COVID-19: considering the human factors. Journal of Cybersecurity, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyae001

Yalpi, D. CYSE 201S (Module 2) Principles of Social Sciences and Cybersecurity Diversity and Cybersecurity. Old Dominion University.
Yalpi, D. CYSE 201S (Module 4) Cybersecurity and Human Factors. Old Dominion University.