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Abstract
This paper challenges the conventional assumption in cybersecurity that users act as rational actors. Despite numerous technical solutions, awareness campaigns, and organizational strategies aimed at bolstering cybersecurity, these often overlook the prevalence of non-rational user behavior. Our study, involving a survey of 208 participants, empirically demonstrates this aspect. We found that a significant portion of users (55.3%) would accept a substantial risk (35%) to click on a potentially malicious link or attachment. This propensity increases to 61% when users are led to believe there is a 65% chance of facing no adverse consequences. To address this irrationality, we explored the efficacy of nudging mechanisms within email systems. Our qualitative user study revealed that incorporating a simple colored nudge in the email intably enhance the ability of users to discern malicious emails, improving decision-making accuracy by an average of 10%.
Third-party tracking is a common and broadly used technique on the Web. Different defense mechanisms have emerged to counter these practices (e.g. browser vendors that ban all third-party cookies). However, these countermeasures only target third-party trackers and ignore the first party because the narrative is that such monitoring is mostly used to improve the utilized service (e.g. analytical services). In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study that analyzes tracking performed by the first party but utilized by a third party to circumvent standard tracking preventing techniques. We visit the top 15,000 websites to analyze first-party cookies used to track users and a technique called “DNS CNAME cloaking”, which can be used by a third party to place first-party cookies. Using this data, we show that 76% of sites effectively utilize such tracking techniques. In a long-running analysis, we show that the usage of such cookies increased by more than 50% over 2021.
