Increasing cyber-security presents an ongoing challenge to security professionals. Research continuously suggests that online users are a weak link in information security. This research explores the relationship between cyber-security and cultural, personality and demographic variables. This study was conducted in four different countries and presents a multi-cultural view of cyber-security. In particular, it looks at how behavior, self-efficacy and privacy attitude are affected by culture compared to other psychological and demographics variables (such as gender and computer expertise). It also examines what kind of data people tend to share online and how culture affects these choices. This work supports the idea of developing personality based UI design to increase users' cyber-security. Its results show that certain personality traits affect the user cyber-security related behavior across different cultures, which further reinforces their contribution compared to cultural effects.

Recent research has begun to focus on the factors that cause people to respond to phishing attacks as well as affect user behavior on social networks. This study examines the correlation between the Big Five personality traits and email phishing response. Another aspect examined is how these factors relate to users' tendency to share information and protect their privacy on Facebook (which is one of the most popular social networking sites). This research shows that when using a prize phishing email, neuroticism is the factor most correlated to responding to this email, in addition to a gender-based difference in the response. This study also found that people who score high on the openness factor tend to both post more information on Facebook as well as have less strict privacy settings, which may cause them to be susceptible to privacy attacks. In addition, this work detected no correlation between the participants estimate of being vulnerable to phishing attacks and actually being phished, which suggests susceptibility to phishing is not due to lack of awareness of the phishing risks and that real-time response to phishing is hard to predict in advance by online users. The goal of this study is to better understand the traits that contribute to online vulnerability, for the purpose of developing customized user interfaces and secure awareness education, designed to increase users' privacy and security in the future.