Episode 4

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Published on:

28th Oct 2021

Phishing's Long Tail with Drs. Clay Posey and Matt Canham

In this episode of Cyber Ways, Dr. Clay Posey of Brigham Young University, and Dr. Matthew Canham from the University of Central Florida join us to discuss their 2021 paper, “Phishing for Long Tails: Examining Organizational Repeat Clickers and Protective Stewards,” which was published in SAGE Open. The paper discusses an extensive research project that investigated user responses to phishing attempts. Their results indicate that the majority of phishing attempts clicks come from a minority of users. Also, some users not only never click on phishing attempts, but also tend to report the attempts. Clay and Matt discuss ways that security professionals can think differently about their users and security education, training, and awareness programs to make their organizations’ systems more secure. You can access their paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244021990656

Dr. Posey is an associate professor of information systems at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business. Prior to joining BYU, Dr. Posey was on the faculty of the University of Central Florida. He also served as a faculty member at the University of Alabama, where he was Associate Director of the Cyber Institute. He has published extensively in top journals, including MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Decision Sciences among many others. His research focuses primarily on behavioral aspects of information security and privacy. He is active in numerous professional organizations, including the IFIP Working Group 8.11/11.13 on Information Systems Security Research. We are proud to say that Dr. Posey is a graduate of Louisiana Tech’s doctoral program.

Dr. Canham is currently a research professor of cybersecurity at the University of Central Florida’s Institute of Simulation and Training. His primary research focus is on defending against synthetic media or deepfake remote online social media attacks, human-AI hybrid defense teams, and preventing inference attacks. Prior to joining UCG. Dr. Canham was the program manager of the Emerging Technologies Program for the Operational Technology Division of the Department of Justice at Quantico, VA. He holds a doctorate in cognition, perception, and cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Santa Barbara.


Dr. Posey and Dr. Canham are founders of Beyond Layer 7, a consultancy that helps organizations better secure the human layer in organizational cybersecurity. See https://www.belay7.com/index.html for more details.

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Cyber Ways is brought to you by the Center for Information Assurance, which is housed in the College of Business at Louisiana Tech University. The podcast is made possible through a "Just Business Grant," which is funded by the University's generous donors.

https://business.latech.edu/cyberways/

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About the Podcast

Cyber Ways Podcast
The Cyber Ways Podcast brings academic cyber security research into the "real world." We interview top academic researchers to find how their research can be put into practice by cyber security professionals. Our focus is on behavioral aspects of cyber security. Occasionally, we touch on related topics, such as information privacy and surveillance.Each episode discusses one published, peer-reviewed article to reveal the practical implications of the research. Your hosts, Tom Stafford and Craig Van Slyke, are both widely published information systems academics who keep one foot in the world of practice.The Cyber Ways Podcast is brought to you by the Center for Information Assurance at the Louisiana Tech University's College of Business. The Cyber Ways podcast is funded through a Just Business grant, made possible through the generosity of donors to the Louisiana Tech University College of Business.

About your host

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Craig Van Slyke

Dr. Tom Stafford and Dr. Craig Van Slyke are both widely published information systems academics who keep one foot in the world of practice.

Stafford serves as editor-in-chief of The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, the longest continually-published MIS journal, and has previously edited 13 special issues of notable journals including Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions, and MIS Quarterly. He co-chaired the 2018 Americas Conference for Information Systems and chaired 2019 Dewald Roode Workshop on Information Systems Security Research. He has been selected to serve as the chair for the 2025 International Conference for Information Systems, one of the most notable yearly research meetings in the field of business technology.

Van Slyke, former dean of the W.A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University, has published over 40 articles in respected academic journals including Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, European Journal of Information Systems, and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. His fourth co-authored textbook, “Information Systems in Business: An Experiential Approach,” is in its fourth edition, and his first trade book, “On Leadership and Life: Essays on Leading and Living Well,” was published in 2017.