"Study: Interactive Security Prompts Help Promote More Secure Behavior Online"

Fear appeals, or persuasive security messages, alert users of security vulnerabilities and motivate behavior change. They can appear in the form of online password prompts, such as password strength meters and password improvement suggestions, which users often ignore. According to research by Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business professor Anthony Vance, the user is more likely to engage with the message while online if the fear appeal is interactive and delivers real-time feedback in response to the user's actions. In a study published in MIS Quarterly, Vance, a professor and Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Fellow in the Department of Business Information Technology as well as the director of Pamplin Integrated Security, and his co-authors analyzed the effectiveness of interactive fear appeals that would interrupt users during activities such as Internet browsing, studying, and online shopping. They studied how interactive fear appeals can persuade individuals to perform online tasks more securely. In order to test the theory that interactive fear appeals can encourage more secure behavior, researchers collaborated with Socwall[.]com to test various types of fear appeals on participants as they created passwords on the site. The researchers created an interactive tool to measure and communicate password strength in terms of the expected amount of time it would take an attacker to crack the password. The tool shared this information in real-time as users created their passwords. Most of the participants agreed that the real-time feedback provided in the interactive fear appeal was the most effective motivator for them to improve their password security. This article continues to discuss the study on promoting more secure online behavior through interactive security prompts. 

Virginia Tech reports "Study: Interactive Security Prompts Help Promote More Secure Behavior Online"