Cyber hygiene: The concept, its measure, and its initial tests

While policy makers to cyber security experts call for improving cyber hygiene, no one really knows what it means. In fact, there exists no scholarly research explicating the concept or its measurement. This research makes an important contribution by conceptualizing cyber hygiene, operationalizing it, empirically identifying its sub-dimensions, and developing an inventory for it. The research achieves this with a mixed-methods approach, where using a combination of experts and a convenience sample of Internet users, it develops the initial items reflecting the construct, empirically refines the items, confirms its dimensions, and validates its fit. The outcome is an 18-item Cyber Hygiene Inventory (CHI) that measures five distinct dimensions of user cyber hygiene. Finally, the research demonstrates why cyber hygiene matters. Using the CHI it shows how cyber hygiene significantly predicts aspects of human cyber interaction that are pivotal to cyber safety including user self-beliefs about technology, how they cognitively process information online, and their online banking behavior.