Prashanth Rajivan

• Professor (Assistant) at University of Washington

Objective This study examines the extent to which cybersecurity attacks on autonomous vehicles (AVs) affect human trust dynamics and driver behavior. Background Human trust is critical for the adoption and continued use of AVs. A pressing concern in this context is the persistent threat of cyberattacks, which pose a formidable threat to the secure...

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telehealth across healthcare systems, permanently transforming the way care is delivered. While telehealth has significantly enhanced healthcare accessibility, this transition has also introduced challenges in maintaining high standards of care. Furthermore, new technological challenges compounded b...

Providing corrections to people who have engaged with false claims in Online Social Networks (OSN) is a form of cognitive intervention employed to address the spread of misinformation. Although there is a large body of work that has studied the effectiveness of corrections for promoting accurate beliefs, there is still much uncertainty around the p...

Dek Multidisciplinary experts’ perspectives on how to strengthen protection of patients’ health information in telehealth designs and workflows.

Phishing attacks remain a significant security threat. One approach to addressing this challenge is through personalized and adaptive anti-phishing training solutions capable of tailoring learning experiences to individual needs and context. This requires cognitive models that are predictive of individual phishing responses and are amenable to anal...

Interactions in healthcare, by necessity, involve sharing sensitive information to achieve high-quality patient outcomes. Therefore, sensitive data must be carefully protected. This paper explores existing privacy and security research conducted in the context of healthcare organizations. We conducted a systematic literature review of N = 1553 pape...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly transformed the healthcare sector, with telehealth services being among the most prominent changes. The adoption of telehealth services, however, has raised new challenges, particularly in the areas of security and privacy. To better comprehend the telehealth needs and concerns of medical professionals, parti...

Despite extensive research on phishing, a severe lack of work centered on attackers has resulted in a limited understanding of the adversarial behaviors conducive to attack success and failures. This work describes a novel method for conducting controlled laboratory studies of cognitive vulnerabilities that attackers experience during the design an...

Future technological innovation will continue to transform the future of human-system interactions (HSI). While immersive sensors, smarter devices, and integrated systems will drive innovations in HSI, the fundamental elements of human information processing must still be considered to ensure the appropriate use of the technology in the context tha...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly transformed the healthcare sector, with telehealth services being among the most prominent changes. The adoption of telehealth services, however, has raised new challenges, particularly in the areas of security and privacy. To better comprehend the telehealth needs and concerns of medical professionals, parti...

Sensitive information is intrinsically tied to interactions in healthcare, and its protection is of paramount importance for achieving high-quality patient outcomes. Research in health-care privacy and security is predominantly focused on understanding the factors that increase the susceptibility of users to privacy and security breaches. To unders...

Sensitive information is intrinsically tied to interactions in healthcare, and its protection is of paramount importance for achieving high-quality patient outcomes. Research in healthcare privacy and security is predominantly focused on understanding the factors that increase the susceptibility of users to privacy and security breaches. To underst...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly transformed the healthcare sector, with telehealth services being among the most prominent changes. The adoption of telehealth services, however, has raised new challenges, particularly in the areas of security and privacy. To better comprehend the telehealth needs and concerns of medical professionals, parti...

Purpose Distinguishing phishing emails from legitimate emails continues to be a difficult task for most individuals. This study aims to investigate the psycholinguistic factors associated with deception in phishing email text and their effect on end-user ability to discriminate phishing emails from legitimate emails. Design/methodology/approach Em...

People adjust decisions based on their experiences; and it is important to know how to shape these experiences effectively to improve their future decisions. We conducted laboratory experiments to study an effective way to shape end-users’ experiences to improve their detection of phishing emails. Despite technical and training-based solutions to p...

Telehealth technologies have aided in the distribution of health-related services, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. With increased telehealth use, privacy risks and security concerns among healthcare providers and patients have subsequently increased. In previous research where 205 research papers were reviewed related to healthcare privacy...

Interactions in healthcare systems, by necessity, involve sharing sensitive information that must be protected. Thus, to understand the existing privacy and security research conducted in the context of healthcare organizations, we conducted a systematic literature review of \(N=205\) papers that examine the security and privacy of patient data . W...

Phishing is the practice of deceiving humans into disclosing sensitive information or inappropriately granting access to a secure system. Unfortunately, there is a severe lack of theoretical models to adequately explain and predict the cognitive dynamics underlying end-user susceptibility to phishing emails. This paper reports findings from an Inst...

Despite significant advancements in security technologies, phishing attacks continue to be rampant and successful because distinguishing phishing emails from real messages remains difficult to most end-users, mainly the targeted kind known as spear-phishing. There is a severe lack of human factor studies on spear-phishing attacks due to lack of met...

Interactions in the Healthcare systems, by necessity, involve sharing sensitive information that must be protected. Thus, to understand the existing privacy and security research conducted in the context of healthcare organizations, we conducted a systematic literature review of N=205 papers that examines the security and privacy of patient data. W...

Installing security updates is one of the important security actions individuals can take to prevent potential cybersecurity threats. The cumulative risk of delaying the installation of security updates over an extended period can be substantial, and yet, people often choose to delay such actions. Past research suggests that people neglect to updat...

Despite significant advancements in security technologies, phishing attacks continue to be rampant and successful because distinguishing phishing emails from real messages remains difficult to most end-users, mainly the targeted kind known as spear-phishing. There is a severe lack of human factor studies on spear-phishing attacks due to lack of met...

Research Questions: What makes people vulnerable to spear phishing attacks? ➢Why does exploitation of personal information increase end user susceptibility to phishing attacks? ➢How to model end-user response to spear phishing attacks? ➢Challenge: Lack of datasets and platforms for studying end user decisions to spear phishing attacks ➢Approach: A...

Computer security and user privacy are critical issues and concerns in the digital era due to both increasing users and threats to their data. Separate issues arise between generic cybersecurity guidance (i.e., protect all user data from malicious threats) and the individualistic approach of privacy (i.e., specific to users and dependent on user ne...

This research investigates the email features that make a phishing email difficult to detect by humans. We use an existing data set of phishing and ham emails and expand that data set by collecting annotations of the features that make the emails phishing. Using the new, annotated data set, we perform cluster analyses to identify the categories of...

Computer security and user privacy are critical issues and concerns in the digital era due to both increasing users and threats to their data. Separate issues arise between generic cybersecurity guidance (i.e., protect all user data from malicious threats) and the individualistic approach of privacy (i.e., specific to users and dependent on user ne...

Installing software updates is one of the most important security actions that people can take to protect their computer systems. However, people often delay installing updates. Why would people delay installation of security updates, knowing that these updates may reduce the risk of information loss from attacks? In a laboratory experiment, we stu...

We studied people’s success on the detection of phishing emails after they were trained under one of three phishing frequency conditions, where the proportion of the phishing emails during training varied as: low frequency (25% phishing emails), medium frequency (50% phishing emails) and high frequency (75% phishing emails). Individual base suscept...

We studied people’s success on the detection of phishing emails after they were trained under one of three phishing frequency conditions, where the proportion of the phishing emails during training varied as: low frequency (25% phishing emails), medium frequency (50% phishing emails) and high frequency (75% phishing emails). Individual base suscept...

The goal of this research is to clarify the conditions that trigger reluctance to take cost‐effective safety measures. We present three experiments. In two of the experiments, the participants were asked to operate a simulated system for 20 periods, each with 10 trials. They could “update the system” to eliminate the risk of a “security failure” th...

A critical requirement for developing a cyber capable workforce is to understand how to challenge, assess, and rapidly develop human cyber skill-sets in realistic cyber operational environments. Fortunately, cyber team competitions make use of simulated operational environments with scoring criteria of task performance that objectively define overa...

(A) Posterior distributions of regression parameters for Model 2 predicting Scenario Inject score with β1 (Communication & Collaboration Factor), β2 (Years Experience), and β3 (Number of Roles) as predictors of team performance. Each of these predictors were significant independently, noting common variance. (B) Posterior distributions of differenc...

In a world that relies increasingly on large amounts of data and on powerful Machine Learning (ML) models, the veracity of decisions made by these systems is essential. Adversarial samples are inputs that have been perturbed to mislead the interpretation of the ML and are a dangerous vulnerability. Our research takes a first step into what can be a...

Phishing attacks are more common and more sophisticated than other forms of social engineering attacks. This study presents an investigation of the relationships between three personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (i.e., the Dark Triad)—and phishing effort, attack success, and end-user susceptibility to phishing emails. P...

Objective: Incident correlation is a vital step in the cybersecurity threat detection process. This article presents research on the effect of group-level information-pooling bias on collaborative incident correlation analysis in a synthetic task environment. Background: Past research has shown that uneven information distribution biases people...

Success of phishing attacks depend on effective exploitation of human weaknesses. This research explores a largely ignored, but crucial aspect of phishing: the adversarial behavior. We aim at understanding human behaviors and strategies that adversaries use, and how these may determine the end-user response to phishing emails. We accomplish this th...

Advancing our understanding about the human dynamics of cyber security is a major research challenge. At this point, it is unclear how cyber defense teams are organized and led in coordinating and working together to mount and conduct an effective cyber defense. Therefore, we do not know what makes a cyber defense team more or less effective in res...

Information complexity and expanse of cybersecurity space surpasses the cognitive ability of individual analysts to be truly situationally aware. Team level situation awareness in cyber security can be described as the coordinated perception and comprehension of significant events in the network by all team members that serve as the basis for effec...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify factors that determine computer and security expertise in end users. They can be significant determinants of human behaviour and interactions in the security and privacy context. Standardized, externally valid instruments for measuring end-user security expertise are non-existent. Design/methodology...

An essential skill in security involves categorizing events based on observed event attributes. That is, determining threat level and priority of the event when choosing an appropriate response action. To explore the basic mechanisms of learning and decision making, we conducted two experiments wherein participants were asked to categorize security...

It is difficult for most people to know if they are working with a secure remote system or facing an online threat. The popularity of Fake Antivirus is a testament to the role of human confusion in high-risk online behavior. To address this, we tested a tool using simple cartoons that functioned both as the risk communication and the controller for...

Transmission of personally identifiable information from smart-phone apps has become ubiquitous as smartphones themselves. Privacy controls provided in the form of permissions warnings falls insufficient especially for communicating risk during app installation. Presenting easy to understand privacy risk icons/cues would help people make low risk a...

Cyber security defense is often performed by a group of people called cyber defense analysts and yet team work and collaboration in cyber defense is almost non-existent. This study, using an agent-based model of the cyber defense analyst's task and interactions, explored the effects of different collaboration strategies and team sizes on performanc...

Cyber security is critical for any modern day organization’s operations. Organizational structure and reward policies not conducive for teamwork may be affecting the performance of cyber defense analysts. Past research shows that team interaction could lead to better cyber defense performance. However, the value of team work in the cyber defense co...

Cyber analysis is a complex task that requires the coordination of a large sociotechnical system of human analysts working together with technology. Adequate situation awareness of such a complex system requires more than aggregate situation awareness of individuals. Teamwork in the form of communication and information coordination is at the heart...

Effective team process is critical for the performance of cyber security teams. To examine this, we observed two comparably skilled cyber security teams participating in the International Capture the Flag (iCTF) competition held in December 2011. At the conclusion of the competition, we followed up with a focus group discussion with six members fro...

Situation awareness (SA) in the cyber security domain is particularly relevant to teams of security analysts who are responsible for detecting cyber threats by perusing continual floods of data such as intrusion alerts and network logs. The challenges that analysts face are matched by those of researchers attempting to understand, measure, and impa...