How Are Czech Individuals Willing to Protect Themselves: A Comparison of Cyber and Physical Realms

Endpoint users are usually viewed as the highest-risk element in the field of cybersecurity. At the same time, they need to be secured not just from the individual-level prism, but also from the state's perspective to counter threats like botnets that harvest weakly secured endpoints and forge an army of so-called zombies out of them that are often used for attacks on critical infrastructure or other systems vital to a state. We can already see steps like the Israeli hotline for cybersecurity incidents of Estonian educational efforts in this area aimed at citizens. Little effort is although made to understand recipients of such measures. Our study partly fills this gap and investigates how endpoint users (citizens) are willing to secure themselves against cyber threats using the survey method. To make results more valid, a unique comparison with comparable physical threats through their impacts was made. The results show statistically significant differences between comparable cyber-physical pairs indicating that a large portion of the sample was not able to assess the threat environment appropriately and that state's intervention with fitting countermeasures is needed. The resulta