Cybersecurity controls are deployed to manage risks posed by malicious behaviours or systems. What is not often considered or articulated is how cybersecurity controls may impact legitimate users (often those whose use of a managed system needs to be protected, and preserved). This oversight characterises the ‘blunt’ nature of many cybersecurity controls. Here we present a framework produced from consideration of concerns across methods from cybercrime opportunity reduction and behaviour change, and existing risk management guidelines. We illustrate the framework and its principles with a range of examples and potential applications, including management of suspicious emails in organizations, and social media controls. The framework describes a capacity to improve the precision of cybersecurity controls by examining shared determinants of negative and positive behaviours in a system. This identifies opportunities for risk owners to better protect legitimate users while simultaneously acting to prevent malicious activity in a managed system. We describe capabilities for a novel approach to managing sociotechnical cyber risk which can be integrated alongside elements of typical risk management processes. This includes consideration of user activities as a system asset to protect, and a consideration of how to engage with other stakeholders in the identification of behaviours to preserve in a system.

Trust and reputation play a core role in underground cybercrime markets, where participants are anonymous and there is little legal recourse for dispute arbitration. These underground markets exist in tension between two opposing forces: the drive to hide incriminating information, and the trust and stability benefits that greater openness yields. Revealing information about transactions to mitigate scams also provides valuable data about the market. We analyse the first dataset, of which we are aware, about the transactions created and completed on a well-known and high-traffic underground marketplace, Hack Forums, along with the associated threads and posts made by its users over two recent years, from June 2018 to June 2020. We use statistical modelling approaches to analyse the economic and social characteristics of the market over three eras, especially its performance as an infrastructure for trust. In the Set-up era, we observe the growth of users making only one transaction, as well as 'power-users' who make many transactions. In the Stable era, we observe a wide range of activities (including large-scale transfers of intermediate currencies such as Amazon Giftcards) which declines slowly from an initial peak. Finally, we analyse the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, concluding that while we see a significant increase in transactins across all categories, this reflects a stimulus of the market, rather than a transformation. New users overcome the 'cold start' problem by engaging in low-level currency exchanges to prove their trustworthiness. We observe currency exchange accounts for most contracts, and Bitcoin and PayPal are the preferred payment methods by trading values and number of contracts involved. The market is becoming more centralised over time around influential users and threads, with significant changes observed during the Set-up and Covid-19 eras.