How Are Czech Individuals Willing to Protect Themselves: A Comparison of Cyber and Physical Realms

Abstract

Endpoint users are usually viewed as the highest-risk element in the field of cybersecurity. At the same time, they need to be protected not just from the individual-level prism but also, from the state’s perspective, to counter threats like botnets that harvest weakly secured endpoints and forge an army of so-called zombies that are often used to attack critical infrastructure or other systems vital to the state. Measures aimed at citizens like the Israeli hotline for cybersecurity incidents or Estonian educational efforts have already started to be implemented. However, little effort is made to understand the recipients of such measures. Our study uses the survey method to partly fill this gap and investigate how endpoint users (citizens) are willing to protect themselves against cyber threats. To make results more valid, a unique comparison was made between cyber threats and physical threats according to the impact which they had. The results show statistically significant differences between comparable cyber-physical pairs indicating that a large portion of the sample was not able to assess the threat environment appropriately and that state intervention with fitting countermeasures is required. The resultant matrix containing frequencies of answers denotes what portion of respondents are willing to invest a certain amount of time and money into countering given threats, this enables the possible identification of weak points where state investment is needed most.