The Blog

A new chapter – a PhD in Cognitive Cybersecurity at UTS

Ok.  New Year.  New me.  I’ve enrolled, and been accepted, to do a PhD at UTS.  This is my third week and it is VERY exciting!  I’m working with some of my old colleagues from the Data61 days, within the Human Performance Analytics team, which is part of the Data Science Institute.  Cool stuff.  Also… […]

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Behavioural Cybersecurity Pt 4: Findings – Creating champions of change

How people react on-line after being scammed – and how to create champions of change within your organisation.

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How to talk about Covid-19. Morrison vs Andrews

So right now, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, Australia is facing one of its biggest public threats to public safety since World War 2. The fear and uncertainty out in the community is palpable and it’s at moments like these where people typically look to leaders for clear communications that both inform us […]

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Behavioural Cybersecurity Pt 3: The research context: clicking on dodgy links

So this is the third in a series of posts delving into behavioural Cybersecurity.  We started with a general overview of how people keeping themselves safe from cyber attacks is surprisingly similar to people keeping themselves fit and healthy.   This means that we can apply really well researched, empirically derived models of health behaviour to […]

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Behavioural Cybersecurity Pt 2: The Models – TRA and TPB.

So previously I talked about health psychology and what it had to offer the domain of cybersecurity behaviour.  I mentioned that there were a number of psychological models which have turned out to be incredibly applicable to understanding and predicting why people do and don’t carry out good cybersecurity practices.  So today we’re going to […]

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Behavioural Cybersecurity Pt 1: What we can learn from Health Psychology.

Cybersecurity, like many other fields, is one where it is easy to become overwhelmed by the technical aspects of the challenges involved, and miss one of the most important determinants of outcomes – namely human behaviour.  In the same way that you can provide an army with weapons, logistics, technology etc…  if the individual soldiers […]

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Great feedback from my students

So as well as my consultancy work, I teach Interaction Design and Human Centred Design Methods at UNSW.  It’s great to keep your ideas fresh by working with lots of 19-25 year olds – and from lots of different cultures – often with VERY different ideas about technology and our relationship with it.  Anyway, I […]

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The Netflix dilemma – Overcoming the paradox of choice

Choosing things can be hard. And when presented with an absolute ocean of possibilities to choose from – it can be really, really hard. One of biggest challenges for content curators is confronting the problem of choice. In this article I look at the cognitive processes of decision making and propose an elegant design solution for tacking the paradox of choice.

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Subjective ratings of frequency and importance.

Some interaction / Information Architecture design minutiae today.  How closely do user ratings of the importance of a feature equate to ratings of frequency of use of that feature? So I was recently asked to validate the IA of an existing product and then fold these findings into the design process for a new product.  […]

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We’re all just rats in cages – and Cory Doctorow knows it

I just stumbled across this piece of Cory Doctorow and it’s an excellent read! And important for anyone interested in the sneaky ways the incredibly adaptive forces of un-controlled capitalism exploit our cognitive weaknesses to influence our behaviour. Doctorow is one of the few people I know who really understand (and can express) the awe-inspiring […]

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