Lynne Coventry

Lynne Coventry
Abertay University | UAD · Department of Cybersecurity

Professor
Looking for collaborators around security and privacy behaviours

About

128
Publications
65,459
Reads
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3,397
Citations
Additional affiliations
February 1993 - September 1994
Heriot-Watt University
Position
  • Research Associate
Description
  • Firstly i was coordinator of a multimedia for education postgraduate training programme. Secondly I was a research Fellow in the Institute for Computer Based Learning investigating the role of technology in Higher Education
September 1987 - August 1991
University of Stirling
Position
  • Wang Research Fellow and Lecturer
July 2009 - present
Northumbria University
Position
  • Director of PaCT Lab

Publications

Publications (128)
Article
Industrial time and space produce marginalities and resistance: Queer time rejects linearity and potentiates alternate experiences (Halbertsam, 2005). Today, many experience phones or smartwatches as mediating temporal ruptures in daily lives (Mowlabocus, 2016), and hookup app industries monetise intimacies. Given permanent online connectivity, wor...
Article
Full-text available
Before the millennium, finding other queer people often involved travelling to a queer venue in a city. Consequently, queer people have been at the forefront of internet technologies such as hook-up apps, namely $2 . Rural hook-up app use is under-researched, and queer visibility may be more carefully negotiated in rural areas than in cities. We ca...
Article
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Background Health-related stigma can act as a barrier to seeking treatment and can negatively impact wellbeing. Comparing stigma communication across different conditions may generate insights previously lacking from condition-specific approaches and help to broaden our understanding of health stigma as a whole. Method A sequential explanatory mix...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Chatbots are increasingly being used across a wide range of contexts. Medical chatbots have the potential to improve healthcare capacity and provide timely patient access to health information. Chatbots may also be useful for encouraging individuals to seek an initial consultation for embarrassing or stigmatizing conditions. Method: Th...
Chapter
Misinformation has proliferated throughout our digital ecosystem, through social media feeds and group chats with friends and family members. However, a gap exists in the current literature on how individuals challenge misinformed views outside of social media platforms. Through an online survey, we exposed multi (\(n=50\)) and mono-cultural (\(n=5...
Article
Full-text available
The use of digital technology amongst people living with a range of long-term health conditions to support self-management has increased dramatically. More recently, digital health technologies to share and exchange personal health data with others have been investigated. Sharing personal health data with others is not without its risks: sharing da...
Article
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While there has been an upsurge in interest in cyber resilience in organizations, we know little about the resilience of individuals to cyber attacks. Cyber resilience in a domestic or non-work setting is important because we know that the majority of people will face cyber threats in their use of technology across a range of contexts, and the abil...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Misinformation has become a regular occurrence in our lives with many diferent approaches being sought to address it. One efective way to combat misinformation is for trusted individuals (e.g., family members) to challenge the misinformed person. However, less is known about how these conversations between trusted individuals occur, and how they ma...
Article
Full-text available
Known age differences exist in relation to information and communication technology (ICT) use, attitudes, access, and literacy. Less is known about age differences in relation to cybersecurity risks and associated cybersecurity behaviours. Using an online survey, this study analyses data from 579 participants to investigate age differences across f...
Article
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Human error in security plays a significant role in the majority of cyber-attacks on businesses. Security behaviours are impacted by numerous factors, including individual perceptions of information sensitivity. However, there is currently a lack of empirical measurement of information sensitivity and its role in determining security behaviours. Th...
Article
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Phishing emails continue to be a major cause of cybersecurity breaches despite the development of technical measures designed to thwart these attacks. Most phishing studies have investigated desktop email platforms, but the use of mobile devices for email exchanges has soared in recent years, especially amongst young adults. In this paper, we explo...
Preprint
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The connection of home electronic devices to the internet allows remote control of physical devices and involves the collection of large volumes of data. With the increase in the uptake of Internet-of-Things home devices, it becomes critical to understand the digital harms of smart homes. We present a systematic literature review on the security an...
Article
Full-text available
Background The emerging landscape of patient-generated data (PGData) provides an opportunity to collect large quantities of information that can be used to develop our understanding of different health conditions and potentially improve the quality of life for those living with long-term health condition (LTHCs). If the potential benefits of PGData...
Article
Full-text available
Background Phishing is a major threat to the data and infrastructure of healthcare organizations and many cyberattacks utilize this socially engineered pathway. Phishing simulation is used to identify weaknesses and risks in the human defences of organizations. There are many factors influencing the difficulty of detecting a phishing email includin...
Article
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Background The growing popularity of collecting self-generated health and lifestyle data presents a valuable opportunity to develop our understanding of long-term health conditions and improve care. Barriers remain to the effective sharing of health and lifestyle data by those living with long-term health conditions which include beliefs around con...
Article
Full-text available
Using digital technology to share patient-generated health data has the potential to improve the self-management of multiple long-term health conditions. Sharing these data can allow patients to receive additional support from healthcare professionals and peer communities, as well as enhance their understanding of their own health. A deeper underst...
Article
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Older adults are increasingly a target for cyber-attacks; however, very little research has investigated how they feel about engaging in protective cyber-security behaviors. We developed and applied a novel card-sorting task to elicit how older adults feel about protective cyber-security behaviors and to identify the factors that impact their confi...
Article
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Business disruption from cyberattacks is a growing concern, yet cyberinsurance uptake remains low. Using an online behavioural economics experiment with 4800 participants across four EU countries, this study tests a predictive model of cyberinsurance adoption, incorporating elements of Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) and the Theory of Planned Be...
Conference Paper
Background Understanding data-sharing in HIV care is timely given the shift to remote consultations during COVID-19. We describe the ‘data-sharing ecosystem’ in HIV care by analysing HIV healthcare professional (HCP) beliefs and practices around sharing diverse types of service user and clinic-generated data across multiple contexts. Methods Durin...
Article
The impacts of COVID-19 are not evenly distributed in society. Understanding demographic and occupational differences in personal experiences and information seeking and how these shape perceptions of COVID-19 related risk may help to improve the effectiveness of public health strategies in the future. We surveyed a nationally representative sample...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Understanding COVID-19 risk perceptions and their impact on behaviour can improve the effectiveness of public health strategies. Prior evidence suggests that, when people perceive uncontrollable risks to their health, they are less likely to engage in healthful behaviour. This article aims to understand the extent to which COVID-19 is perceived...
Article
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Active aging technologies are increasingly designed to support an active lifestyle. However, the way in which they are designed can raise different barriers to acceptance of and use by older adults. Their designers can adopt a negative stereotype of aging. Thorough understanding of user requirements is central to this problem. This paper investigat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Active aging technologies are increasingly designed to support an active lifestyle. However, the way in which they are designed can raise different barriers to acceptance of and use by older adults. Their designers can adopt a negative stereotype of aging. Thorough understanding of user requirements is central to this problem. This paper investigat...
Article
Full-text available
Staff behaviour plays a key role in the cybersecurity position of an organisation. Despite this, behaviour-change interventions are not commonly applied within the field of cybersecurity. Behaviour change technique could be particularly beneficial given increasing concerns around healthcare cybersecurity risks; particularly following the 2017 Wanna...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background The impacts of COVID-19 are not evenly distributed in society. Understanding the differences in the experiences and perceptions of COVID-19 related risk may help to improve the effectiveness of public health strategies in the future. Method We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 496 participants during the strictest period of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Understanding COVID-19 risk perceptions and their impact on behaviour can improve the effectiveness of public health strategies in the future. Prior evidence suggests that, when people perceive uncontrollable risks to their health, they are less likely to make efforts to protect their health in those ways which they can control (e.g. thr...
Chapter
Full-text available
There are increasing concerns relating to cybersecurity of healthcare data and medical devices. Cybersecurity in this sector is particularly important given the criticality of healthcare systems, the impacts of a breach or cyberattack (including in the worst instance, potential physical harm to patients) and the value of healthcare data to criminal...
Chapter
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into different areas of our lives. AI has the potential to increase productivity and relieve workload on staff in high-pressure jobs such as healthcare. However, most AI healthcare tools have failed. For AI to be effective, it is vital that users can understand how the system is processi...
Article
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Retirement is a major life transition, which leads to substantial changes across almost all aspects of day-to-day life. Although this transition has previously been seen as the normative marker for entry into older adulthood, its influence on later life has remained relatively unstudied in terms of technology use and cybersecurity behaviours. This...
Article
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Third-sector organizations, an important support for people living with HIV, increasingly use digital technology to improve service efficiency and reach. However, there is limited empirical evidence on this use by women living with HIV. The 4M Network (4MNet) is a peer-run UK-wide network of trained Mentor Mothers (MMs) living with HIV; it uses the...
Article
Full-text available
Background: To address increasing demand of mental healthcare treatments for older adults and the need to reduce delivery costs, healthcare providers are turning to mobile applications. The importance of psychological barriers have been highlighted in the uptake of mobile-based mental health interventions and efforts have been made to identify the...
Article
Full-text available
Several technological devices have been developed over the last decade to support an active lifestyle as people age. Despite substantial investment, they have failed to reach widespread acceptance. Limited adoption can be linked to little involvement of prospective users in the design process and overreliance on deficit models of ageing that portra...
Poster
Full-text available
The poster describes a semi-structured interview study co-conducted by PhD candidate Kiersten Hay of Northumbria University, with Longret Kwardem, peer researcher of the 4MNetwork. The research explored the use of a WhatsApp group by 4M Network members - all women living with HIV. The benefits and drawbacks of this social media app for this use are...
Conference Paper
In this paper we describe how we engaged a group of healthy older adults in lifelogging and how we used their data to help design a healthy-aging intervention. 35 participants (mean age = 73.6, age range 59-88, Men=15, Women = 20) were tracked longitudinally for 18 months. Participants provided data at three time points. This involved the use of ac...
Conference Paper
Older adults are increasingly vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and scams. Yet we know relatively little about their understanding of cybersecurity, their information-seeking behaviours, and their trusted sources of information and advice in this domain. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with community-dwelling older adults in order to e...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many security experts bemoan that consumers behave insecurely. Yet, current approaches to improving behavior either fail to consider when people may be most receptive to an intervention, or only consider experiences of threat (e.g., getting hacked) when identifying opportune moments for behavior change. We instead explore how an exemplar, positive...
Preprint
Full-text available
Older adults are increasingly vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and scams. Yet we know relatively little about their understanding of cybersecurity, their information-seeking behaviours, and their trusted sources of information and advice in this domain. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with community-dwelling older adults in order to e...
Chapter
This paper considers some of the issues around autonomous systems and the different types of risk involved in their implementation. These risks are both barriers to the implementation of a successful autonomous system and risks that are consequences of the use of such systems. The different levels of automation, and different approaches to categori...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Despite increased awareness of cybersecurity incidents and consequences, organisations still struggle to convince employees to comply with information security policies and engage in effective cyber prevention. Here we introduce and evaluate The Cybersurvival Task, a ranking task that highlights cybersecurity misconceptions amongst employees and th...
Conference Paper
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Recent security breaches have highlighted the consequences of reusing passwords across online accounts. Recent guidance on password policies by the UK government recommend an emphasis on password length over an extended character set for generating secure but memorable passwords without cognitive overload. This paper explores the role of three nudg...
Article
A cross sectional survey examined an extended version of Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to identify factors that influence employees’ intentions to perform three anti-malware behaviours. 526 employees completed an online survey that measured an employees’ threat (severity and susceptibility) and coping (self-efficacy, response efficacy and resp...
Article
The current paper outlines an exploratory case study in which we examined the extent to which specific communities of Twitter users engaged with the debate about the security threat known as “Heartbleed” in the first few days after this threat was exposed. The case study explored which professional groups appeared to lead the debate about Heartblee...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Phishing continues to be a problem for both individuals and organisations, with billions of dollars lost every year. We propose the use of nudges-more specifically social saliency nudges-that aim to highlight important information to the user when evaluating emails. We used Signal Detection Theory to assess the effects of both sender saliency (high...
Conference Paper
Technologies designed to support ageing can be deemed to be ageist in that they often exhibit a benevolent paternalism that tries to 'protect' older people. Often this involves gathering extensive data to monitor physical and cognitive decline at the expense of an individual's privacy, with an underlying, often implicit, assumption that older adult...
Conference Paper
Cybersecurity suffers from the problem of poor incident reporting. We explored message influences on incident reporting rate. Participants were presented with messages that differed in terms of (i) whether the problem was framed as a technical or a security issue and (ii) the perceived beneficiaries of making a report (benefit to the user, to other...
Conference Paper
A number of interventions exist to support older adults in ageing well and these typically involve support for an active and sociable ageing process. We set out to examine the privacy implications of an intervention that would monitor mobility and share lifestyle and health data with a community of trusted others. We took a privacy-by-design approa...
Article
A quantitative empirical online study examined a set of 16 security hazards on the Internet and two comparisons in 436 UK- and US students, measuring perceptions of risk and other risk dimensions. First, perceived risk was highest for identity theft, keylogger, cyber-bullying and social engineering. Second, consistent with existing theory, signific...
Chapter
While behavior change methods have become relatively commonplace in the health domain, they have only recently been applied to the cybersecurity field. In this chapter we review two fundamentally different approaches to behavior change in cybersecurity. First we explore “nudging” and behavioral interventions arising from the MINDSPACE framework. Se...
Article
Full-text available
Despite their best intentions, people struggle with the realities of privacy protection and will often sacrifice privacy for convenience in their online activities. Individuals show systematic, personality dependent differences in their privacy decision making, which makes it interesting for those who seek to design ‘nudges’ designed to manipulate...
Article
Full-text available
The article has open access status and freely available from the Springer website! Mobile devices offer a common platform for both leisure and work-related tasks, but this has resulted in a blurred boundary between home and work. In this paper, we explore the security implications of this blurred boundary, both for the worker and the employer. Mob...
Conference Paper
New technologies offer an opportunity to improve the wellbeing and independence of older adults, but many of the potential benefits, have not yet been realised. Some technologies suggest a lifestyle of constant monitoring, controlling and nudging - transformations that could be perceived as threatening. To better understand older adult perceptions...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A wide spectrum of research has been in done in designing technologies for older people that address different aspects of the ageing process, such as physical, mental, and emotional health. Recently, technology-based interventions that promote physical activity have gained momentum. Prior to designing the interventions, the key questions we need to...
Conference Paper
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Research on marketing and deception has identified principles of persuasion that influence human decisions. However, this research is scattered: it focuses on specific contexts and produces different taxonomies. In regard to frauds and scams, three taxonomies are often referred in the literature: Cialdini’s principles of influence, Gragg’s psycholo...
Conference Paper
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Walker-use among older adults is often avoided because of the stigma of using one. Drawing on the appraisal theory of stress, we argue that stigma associated with walker-use is subject to various cognitive appraisals that affect whether the user sees the walker as stigmatizing and the extent to which they can cope with that stigma. We followed a pa...
Conference Paper
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People make security choices on a daily basis without fully considering the security implications of those choices. In this paper we present a prototype application which promotes the choice of secure wireless network options, specifically when users are unfamiliar with the wireless networks available. The app was developed based on behavioural the...
Patent
Full-text available
Described and illustrated herein is an exemplary method of operating an analyte measurement device having a display, user interface, processor, memory, and user interface buttons. Such method can be achieved by measuring an analyte with the analyte measurement device, displaying a value representative of the analyte, querying a user to select a pre...
Conference Paper
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The body of research that focuses on employees' Information Security Policy compliance is problematic as it treats compliance as a single behavior. This study explored the underlying behavioral context of information security in the workplace, exploring how individual and organizational factors influence the interplay of the motivations and barrier...
Article
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In this work we address the main issues of Information Technology (IT) consumerization that are related to security risks, and vulnerabilities of devices used within Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy in particular. We propose a 'soft' mitigation strategy for user actions based on nudging, widely applied to health and social behavior influence....
Conference Paper
Cyberbullying is a growing social problem especially amongst school aged children facilitated by the prevalent use of communication technology. This paper examines (a) the extent to which cyberbullying incidents are distinguishable by perceived severity and (b) the role of perpetrator anonymity on such perceptions of severity. Sixty six female scho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Cyberbullying is a growing social problem especially amongst school aged children facilitated by the prevalent use of communication technology. This paper examines (a) the extent to which cyberbullying incidents are distinguishable by perceived severity and (b) the role of perpetrator anonymity on such perceptions of severity. Sixty six female scho...