Phishing resiliency across socio-cultural Spheres: Cyrillic Orthographic Zone versus The Five Eyes

Abstract Models of economic and health behaviors have been applied to computer security decision-making. One argument against health models is that cybersecurity behavioral factors may vary widely across cultures, while human biology remains the same. In this work we explore the degree to which assumptions of cybersecurity decision-making is consistent across two cultural and linguistic spheres of influence. Specifically, we replicate a study of phishing resilience that was implemented across five English-speaking nations in four nations within the Cyrillic orthographic zone. We compare the overall resilience and factors weights between the two population groups. Our findings illustrate that there were few indicators of significant difference between the two human subjects studies. While the comparisons of the results opens questions that can only be answered with the large scale longitudinal studies, overall the implications support arguments for the application of health models to cybersecurity.