Content validity, the extent to which a measurement reflects the specific intended domain of content, is a basic type of validity for a valid measurement. It has usually been examined using qualitative methods and has not been given as much attention as the other psychometric properties such as internal consistency reliability, indicator reliability and construct validity in the IS field. In this paper, a quantitative approach including the proportion of substantive agreement (P_SA), and substantive validity (C_SV) was used to examine content validity for 80 items covering eighth domains related to organizational and individual perspectives of information security. The content validity for the organizational perspective was examined using data from a total of 56 content domain experts. Data from 51 experts were further used to examine content validity for the individual perspective of information security. 31 items did not have an adequate content validity, leaving the instrument with 49 items that have been evaluated for their content validity and can be used in future empirically tests of hypotheses in the information security field. To the knowledge of the authors this quantitative method to assess content validity of items in the process of developing instruments hasn’t yet been applied in the field information security.

This paper presents an empirical investigation on what behavioral information security governance factors drives the establishment of information security knowledge sharing in organizations. Data was collected from organizations located in different geographic regions of the world, and the amount of data collected from two countries – namely, USA and Sweden – allowed us to investigate if the effect of behavioral information security governance factors on the establishment of security knowledge sharing differs based on national culture.

The study followed a mixed methods research design, wherein qualitative data was collected to both establish the study’s research model and develop a survey instrument that was distributed to 578 information security executives. The results suggest that processes to coordinate implemented security knowledge sharing mechanisms have a major direct influence on the establishment of security knowledge sharing in organizations; the effect of organizational structure (e.g., centralized security function to develop and deploy uniform firm-wide policies, and use of steering committees to facilitate information security planning) is slightly weaker, while business-based information security management has no significant direct effect on security knowledge sharing. A mediation analysis revealed that the reason for the non-significant direct relation between business-based information security management and security knowledge sharing is the fully mediating effect of coordinating information security processes. Thus, the results disentangles the interrelated influences of behavioral information security governance factors on security knowledge sharing by showing that information security governance sets the platform to establish security knowledge sharing, and coordinating processes realize the effect of both the structure of the information security function and the alignment of information security management with business needs.

A multigroup analysis identified that national culture had a significant moderating effect on the association between four of the six proposed relations. In Sweden – which is seen as a less individualist, feminine country – managers tend to focus their efforts on implementing controls that are aligned with business activities and employees’ need; monitoring the effectiveness of the implemented controls, and assuring that the controls are not too obtrusive to the end user. On the contrary, US organizations establish security knowledge sharing in their organization through formal arrangements and structures. These results imply that Swedish managers perceive it to be important to involve, or at least know how their employees cope with the decisions that have been made, thus favoring local participation in information security management, while US managers may feel the need to have more central control when running their information security function.

The findings suggest that national culture should be taken into consideration in future studies – in particular when investigating organizations operating in a global environment – and understand how it affects behaviors and decision-making. 

This paper explores the relation between a set of behavioural information security governancefactors and employees’ information security awareness. To enable statistical analysis betweenproposed relations, data was collected from two different samples in 24 organisations: 24information security executives and 240 employees. The results reveal that having a formalunit with explicit responsibility for information security, utilizing coordinating committees,and sharing security knowledge through an intranet site significantly correlates withdimensions of employees’ information security awareness. However, regular identification ofvulnerabilities in information systems and related processes is significantly negativelycorrelated with employees’ information security awareness, in particular managing passwords.The effect of behavioural information security governance on employee information securityawareness is an understudied topic. Therefore, this study is explorative in nature and theresults are preliminary. Nevertheless, the paper provides implications for both research andpractice.

This paper empirically investigates how organizational and individual factors complement each other in shaping employees' intention to resist social engineering. The study followed a mixed methods research design, wherein qualitative data were collected to both establish the study's research model and develop a survey instrument that was distributed to 4296 organizational employees from a diverse set of organizations located in Sweden. The results showed that attitude toward resisting social engineering has the strongest direct association with intention to resist social engineering, while both self-efficacy and normative beliefs showed weak relationships with intention to resist social engineering. Furthermore, the results showed that transformational leadership was strongly associated with both perceived information security culture and information security awareness. Two mediation tests showed that attitude and normative beliefs partially mediate the effect of information security culture on employees' intention to resist social engineering. This suggests that both attitude and normative beliefs play important roles in governing the relationship between information security culture and intention to resist social engineering. A third mediation test revealed that information security culture fully explains the effect of transformational leadership on employees' attitude toward resisting social engineering. Discussion of the results and practical implications of the performed research are provided.

In this paper, we shed a light on the intention-action relationship in the context of external behavioral information security threats. Specifically, external threats caused by employees' social engineering security actions were examined. This was done by examining the correlation between employees' reported intention to resist social engineering and their self-reported actions of hypothetical scenarios as well as observed action in a phishing experiment. Empirical studies including 1787 employees pertaining to six different organizations located in Sweden and USA laid the foundation for the statistical analysis. The results suggest that employees' intention to resist social engineering has a significant positive correlation of low to medium strength with both self-reported action and observed action. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation between social engineering actions captured through written scenarios and a phishing experiment was identified. Due to data being collected from employees from two different national cultures, an exploration of potential moderating effect based on national culture was also performed. Based on this analysis we identified that the examined correlations differ between Swedish, and US employees. The findings have methodological contribution to survey studies in the information security field, showing that intention and self-reported behavior using written scenarios can be used as proxies of observed behavior under certain cultural contexts rather than others. Hence, the results support managers operating in a global environment when assessing external behavioral information security threats in their organization.

Purpose – The purpose of the study was twofold: to investigating the correlation between a sample of personal psychological and demographic factors and resistance to phishing; and to investigate if national culture moderates the strength of these correlations.

Design/methodology/approach – To measure potential determinants, a survey was distributed to 2099 employees of nine organizations in Sweden, USA, and India. Then, we conducted unannounced phishing exercises in where a phishing attack targeted the same sample.

Findings – Intention to resist social engineering, general information security awareness, formal IS training, and computer experience were identified to have a positive significant correlation to phishing resilience. Furthermore, the results showed that the correlation between phishing determinants and employees’ observed phishing behavior differs between Swedish, US and Indian employees in six out of fifteen cases.

Research limitations/implications – The identified determinants all had, even though not a strong, a significant positive correlation. This suggests that more work needs to be done in order to more fully understand determinants of phishing. The study assumes that culture effects apply to all individuals in a nation. However, difference based on cultures might exist based on firm characteristics within a country. The Swedish sample is dominating, while only 40 responses from Indian employees were collected. This unequal size of samples suggests that conclusions based on the results from the cultural analysis should be drawn cautiously. A natural continuation of our research is therefore to further explore the generalizability of our findings by collecting data from other nations with similar cultures as Sweden, USA and India.

Originality/value – Using direct observations of employees’ security behaviors has rarely been used in previous research. Furthermore, analyzing potential differences in theoretical models based on national culture is an understudied topic in the behavioral information security field. This paper addresses these both two issues.

Analyzing the role of target-related information in a security attack is an understudied topic in the behavioral information security research field. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effect of adding information about the target in phishing attacks. Data was collected by conducting two phishing experiments using a sample of 158 employees at five Swedish organizations. The first experiment included a traditional mass-email attack with no target-related information, and the second experiment was a targeted phishing attack in which we included specific information related to the targeted employees' organization. The results showed that the number of organizational employees falling victim to phishing significantly increased when target-related information was added in the attack. During the first experiment 5.1 % clicked on the malicious link compared to 27.2 % of the second phishing attack, and 8.9 % of those executed the binary compared to 3.2 % of the traditional phishing attack. Adding target-related information is an effective way for attackers to significantly increase the effectiveness of their phishing attacks. This is the first study that has showed this significant effect using organizational employees as a sample. The implications of the results are further discussed.

Threats from social engineering can cause organisations severe damage if they are not considered and managed. In order to understand how to manage those threats, it is important to examine reasons why organisational employees fall victim to social engineering. In this paper, the objective is to understand security behaviours in practice by investigating factors that may cause an individual to comply with a request posed by a perpetrator. In order to attain this objective, we collect data through a scenario-based survey and conduct phishing experiments in three organisations. The results from the experiment reveal that the degree of target information in an attack increases the likelihood that an organisational employee fall victim to an actual attack. Further, an individual’s trust and risk behaviour significantly affects the actual behaviour during the phishing experiment. Computer experience at work, helpfulness and gender (females tend to be less susceptible to a generic attack than men), has a significant correlation with behaviour reported by respondents in the scenario-based survey. No correlation between the performance in the scenario-based survey and experiment was found. We argue that the result does not imply that one or the other method should be ruled out as they have both advantages and disadvantages which should be considered in the context of collecting data in the critical domain of information security. Discussions of the findings, implications and recommendations for future research are further provided.