Experimental Research on Personal Awareness and Behavior for Information Security Protection

A virus infection situation can be considered a kind of emergency or disaster. Although such a situation is an area applicable to psychology, there has not yet been any report of specific studies in this field. Furthermore, in the field of information security, even though an individual might intend to take protective action, it is an observable fact that many people do not actually do so. Research on individual behavior and decision making in a virus infection situation is important in developing information security protection. We implemented a virtual game based on collective intelligence to investigate experimentally the awareness that users with infected PCs have of information security. By analyzing the experiment data in combination with questionnaire results, we have investigated why many people do not take appropriate recovery action against virus infection, and also the personal profiles which indicate that people are likely to take such recovery action.