The Appropriation of Fear as a Context by Cybersecurity

In this paper the researcher explores the context of fear that permeates the application of cybersecurity and its research. In a society where security threats are ever present from national health care and critical infrastructure systems to more standard phone scams, the cybersecurity professional often operates as if in a state of war. With perceived vulnerability to threats found to influence security behavior in organisation's and for home users, for cybersecurity professionals, fear appeals in cybersecurity reports are designed to provoke a client, end-user, and organization into taking security more seriously. In this paper, it is suggested that a third space between the sometimes-polarized perspectives of the cybersecurity professional and the end-user may be built to alleviate at least some of the fears we have.