Publications

Scottish Justice Fellowship Briefing

The reality of ‘cyber awareness’: findings and policy implications for Scotland by Dr Shane Horgan, Edinburgh Napier University.

This briefing paper represents a summary of doctoral research that explores how different groups make sense of and respond to cybercrime in their everyday lives. The research found that people from different groups, places, and times think about cybercrime and cybersecurity in different ways. This has implications for government and police awareness raising campaigns. Population level awareness campaigns designed to communicate ‘simple’ messages may get lost in translation or disregarded because they do not resonate with the social and cultural contexts of their target audiences. After considering the challenges government and police face, the report imagines possible future directions for cybersecurity awareness raising that may enable them to be more sensitive to local social cultural contexts and foster the creation of communities of supportive cybersecurity.