Shifting Engagement With Cybersecurity: How People Discover and Share Cybersecurity Content at Work and at Home

2026-02-23

AI Summary

This study investigates how workplace cybersecurity training influences individuals’ willingness to share information and their memory preferences in domestic settings. Drawing on an online survey of 1,200 participants from the United Kingdom, United States, France, and Germany, the research employs quantitative methods to analyze the joint effects of information source, content type, and communication channel on recall and sharing behaviors. Findings indicate that trained individuals are more likely to remember security-related information provided by their employers and exhibit significantly reduced willingness to share such information within household contexts. This work reveals, for the first time, a mechanism through which workplace training shifts individuals’ attentional focus from home to organizational environments, offering empirical support for optimizing cross-contextual cybersecurity awareness strategies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Machine Learning: Privacy

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Cybersecurity awareness is shaped by a wide range of professional and personal experiences, including information and training at work and the sharing of news and other content at home. In order to explore how people discover cybersecurity content and the effect that participation in workplace training may have on this we present an online study of 1200 participants from the UK, US, France, and Germany. Those undertaking cybersecurity training at work showed reduced intention to share information at home, shifting the focus towards the workplace. They were also more likely to recall cybersecurity information shared by their employer than from any other source, which in turn correlated with content type and distribution channel. We critically reflect on this shift, highlighting opportunities to improve cybersecurity information sharing at work and at home.

Problem

• cybersecurity awareness
• information sharing
• workplace training
• content discovery
• behavioral shift

Innovation

• cybersecurity awareness
• information sharing
• workplace training
• behavioral shift
• cross-context engagement