Fridays bring the frivolity

Imagine you are full of energy and focused on your work at the office in the morning. In the afternoon, however, you feel tired and may be more easily fooled by suspicious emails or tempted to click on links that become a gateway for cyber attacks. The method recently recommended by TU Professor Alexander Benlian (Department of Information Systems and Electronic Services) and two colleagues from Canada and the USA aims to capture precisely such changes in external circumstances or fluctuations in mood and energy levels.

Previous studies have mostly looked at snapshots of larger groups of people, for example through one-off cross-sectional surveys. These do provide general findings, such as that some employees are less likely to adhere to security rules if they are not responsible or that people use typical justification strategies – such as: “Nothing will happen” or “Our IT specialists don't adhere to them either” – when they disregard cyber security rules. But why does someone behave in a particularly security-conscious manner one day, while being more careless the next?

In order to better understand this, the researchers interviewed 108 office workers over a four-week study period on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – a total of 1296 observations were made. This makes it possible to understand whether the test subjects are more conscientious on Mondays than on Fridays, for example, when dealing with suspicious links that could potentially transport malware or initiate phishing attacks. Interestingly, the researchers found that for some people, the tendency to disregard security rules increases towards the end of the working day and intensifies as the week progresses.

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