One consequence of cyberattacks is that the public will call for more government regulations to protect cybersecurity. However, implementation of such regulations often come with compromises like personal privacy and freedom. The paper studies the public’s motivation behind requesting for more control from the government and whether the types of cyberattack would impact the kinds of government intervention that people desire.
Cyberattacks only recently had tangible impact on many people’s daily lives, like the Colonial Pipeline attack. Combined with general lack of cybersecurity knowledge, the public’s perception and assessment of cybersecurity threats may be exaggerating or underestimating the actual level of threats. Consequently, psychological factors are just as important in affecting policy making as other factors, including technological and political ones. To study this effect, the study showed respondents (chosen from Israelis) a series of video news reports on cyber attacks and surveyed their opinion on policies related to cybersecurity. The result of the study shows that exposure to the news of lethal cyberattacks had more drastic impact on the public’s opinion over news of nonlethal cyberattacks. Moreover, exposure to the news of cyberattacks made the respondents demand more oversight regulation policies, but caused no change in demand for prevention regulation policies.
