"A Context-based Approach for Assessing The Information Security Awareness of Users"

Assessing the information security awareness (ISA) of users is crucial for protecting systems and organizations from social engineering attacks. Current methods do not consider the context of use when assessing users' ISA, and therefore they cannot accurately reflect users' actual behavior, which often depends on that context. We propose a novel context-based, data-driven, approach for assessing the ISA of users. In this approach, different behavioral and contextual factors, such as spatio-temporal information and browsing habits, are used to assess users' ISA. Since defining each context explicitly is impractical for a large context space, we utilize a deep neural network to represent users' contexts implicitly from contextual factors. We evaluate our approach empirically using a real-world dataset of users' activities collected from smartphone users. The results show that the proposed method and context information improve ISA assessment accuracy significantly.

Bio: Adir Solomon is a research project manager and data scientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber Security Research Center (CBG), who led projects in collaboration with industry and various Israeli security entities. He is also a Ph.D. student in the Software and Information Systems Engineering Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His main research interests are in the fields of machine learning, deep learning, data mining, and natural language processing, and their applications in the areas of user modeling, computational criminology, and recommender systems.