UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Jones, Harriet Mary

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    The Restrictive Deterrent Effect of Warning Messages on the Behavior of Computer System Trespassers
    (2014) Jones, Harriet Mary; Maimon, David; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Computer system trespassing is a growing concern, but it has received little criminological attention. The present study discusses the results of an experiment which looked at system trespasser behavior after exposure to one of three warning messages (or no message) in the context of deterrence theory. One message consisted of an attempt at moral persuasion; the second a generic legal warning, and the third an ambiguous threat. Keystroke data was analyzed to assess how the type of message affected the employment of restrictive deterrent techniques designed to limit trespasser activity on a compromised system. It was found that moral persuasion generally reduces both the incidence and frequency of command entry by trespassers on an illegally accessed system, while legal and ambiguous warnings produce no significant differences from the control condition. This suggests that in order to reduce trespasser activity, system administrators should use moral persuasion instead of legal sanction threats.