The Visual Design of Network Data to Enhance Cyber Security Awareness of the Everyday Internet User

Abstract

Technology and the use of online services are very prevalent across much of our everyday lives. As our digital interactions continue to grow, there is a need to improve public awareness of the risks to our personal online privacy and security. Designing for cyber security awareness has never been so important. In this work, we consider people’s current impressions towards their privacy and security online. We also explore how abnormal network activity data can be visually conveyed to afford a heightened cyber security awareness. In detail, the paper documents the different effects of visual variables in an edge and node DoS visualisation to depict abnormally high volumes of traffic. The results from two studies show that people are generally becoming more concerned about their privacy and security online. Moreover, we have found that the more focus based visual techniques (i.e. blur) and geometry-based techniques (i.e. jaggedness and sketchiness) afford stronger impressions of uncertainty from abnormally high volumes of network traffic. In terms of security, these impressions and feelings alert in the end-user that something is not quite as it should be and hence develop a heightened cyber security awareness.