Dimensions of internet use and threat sensitivity: an exploratory study among students of higher education

The property space of internet use has three dimensions: type of use, amount of use and variety of use. While internet is one of the sources of information security knowledge among students, the relationship of dimensions of internet use and information security awareness has not yet been explored. The purpose of this paper is to explore relationship between dimensions of internet use and, information security and privacy (IS&P) threats sensitivity-defined as the ability of a person to assess impact of a threat to their IS&P through perceived importance of a threat. Threat sensitivity is measured by calculating threat sensitivity scores for seventy four different IS&P threats in fourteen functional areas [13]. Using convenient sampling, a response set of 1280 was collected from the students of six higher education institutions in India, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. Dimensions of internet use are computed and their correlations are calculated with student's overall threat sensitivity. Only type of use is found significantly correlated with overall threat sensitivity. Application of ANalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) shows that students are significantly different in overall threat sensitivity, if divided into groups based upon the type of internet use. Further, the relationship between dimensions of internet use and student's threat sensitivity within all fourteen functional areas was also examined.