Article Review #1
Cyberattacks, cyber threats, and attitudes toward cybersecurity policies
Nicholas T Gray
Old Dominion University
CYSE 201S: Cybersecurity & Social Science
Diwakar Yalpi
10/2/2024

Cyberattacks, cyber threats, and attitudes towards cybersecurity policies
After reviewing this article, I found that the principles of social science were a bit of parsimony,
determinism, objectivity, and skepticism. The researchers kept the experiment as simple as possible
because they had three different groups showed the same concept: a news video with various scenarios
to see what they would think about current cyber security policies. Following the hypothesis, if the
victims have never experienced a cyber attack, whether it was lethal or nonlethal, then they wouldn’t
feel nearly as strongly as someone who did. The participant pool was objective considering “One
thousand twentytwo participants were randomly assigned to the three groups,” and “The mean age of
the participants was 41 (SD = 14.81), and gender distribution of 49.96% male and 50.04% female.” This
gives a different perspective from those who are younger, older, male, or female.
The study had a few hypotheses in question, which were whether or not the type of exposure to
a cyber attack had any influence on how much the victim was willing to support cybersecurity policies
and that people who are exposed to a lethal cyberattack will be more in favor of cybersecurity policies
than a person who was exposed to a nonlethal cyber-attack. The type of analysis used in this research
was a quantitative approach. The researchers conducted a controlled survey experiment by exposing the
participants to “simulated news reports about major cyberattacks,” as stated in the article.
The article ties into things I’ve seen in the PowerPoint from class, for example, when
cyberattacks “wanna cry” and the “cyber intrusion into the Democratic National Committee’s
networks,” were mentioned. The reason these attacks took place was most likely due to one of the
individual motives. The article mentions that “Civilians who are exposed to political violence often suffer
from feelings of trauma, anxiety, and helplessness,” this undoubtedly aligns with the psychological
consequences of victimization.
To conclude, this article was able to prove through its research that people are more inclined to
receive help or want better protection instilled after becoming a victim of a cyber-attack. It also showed

just how important it is to maintain awareness and has incited behavioral changes in people, assuming
they know how much a cyber attack can affect them. After reading this article, it became more apparent
that cybersecurity policies must constantly be reviewed so that they can be updated if and when they
become ineffective