Development of a new ‘human cyber-resilience scale’

Abstract

Abstract While there has been an upsurge in interest in cyber resilience in organizations, we know little about the resilience of individuals to cyber attacks. Cyber resilience in a domestic or non-work setting is important because we know that the majority of people will face cyber threats in their use of technology across a range of contexts, and the ability to resist a cyber attack, or quickly recover and learn from a successful attack, is as important for individuals’ wellbeing as it is for organizations. There is, unfortunately, a dearth of studies on the cyber resilience of people, in part because it is not clear how such a construct could be defined and then measured. In the present work, we present a series of five studies—with a total sample of n = 1503—that sought to develop and validate a theoretically based measure of cyber resilience for individuals. The final scale, comprising 16 items and 4 subscales (self-efficacy, learning and growth, social support, and helplessness), demonstrates good internal reliability and validity.