Digital Vulnerability Awareness : In a “working from home” environment during COVID-19

Abstract: Employees who have adapted to a "working from home" environment, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly face a lack of awareness regarding cybersecurity and cybercrimes. It is well established that the rate of employees hacked has increased dramatically due to the pandemic. This study aims to determine what has more impact on digital vulnerability awareness of cybersecurity and cybercrime. Specifically, it investigates from the perspectives of training and education, digital competence, being a victim, and how protection motivation plays a role in policy following. In this context, digital vulnerability is defined as the risk that individuals might put themselves into unknowingly through the lack of security when working from home, which leads to having incriminating information publicly disclosed and exploited by third parties. Digital competence refers to the extent of an individual's information technology skills. To test the hypothesis that training and education lead to higher digital vulnerability awareness, a set of interviews was conducted with various employees working from home from different industries, age groups, and countries. Furthermore, an online survey was distributed among online communities on Discord, Facebook and Instagram. The survey was meant to prove the points made by the participants of the interviews. The results showed a slight effect in the opposite direction than hypothesised: digital vulnerability awareness was associated with digital competence over training and education. These results suggest that employees who have higher digital competence are more likely to understand their digital vulnerability awareness, making it easier to identify cyber threats. On this basis, the concept of training and educating is not enough to prevent cybercrimes. To better prevent cybercrime, employees must be willing to learn and understand the threats and risks.