The advent of telehealth revolutionizes healthcare by enabling remote consultations, yet poses complex security and privacy challenges. These are often acutely felt by lower-resourced, allied-healthcare practices. To address this, our study focuses on audiologists and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in private practice settings, often characterized by limited information technology resources. Over the course of six months, we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten audiologists and ten SLPs to understand their telehealth experiences and concerns. Key findings reveal a diversity of opinions on technology trustworthiness, data security concerns, implemented security protocols, and patient behaviors. Given the nature of the medical practitioners’ primary work, participants expressed varied concerns about data breaches and platform vulnerabilities, yet trusted third-party services like Zoom due to inadequate expertise and time to evaluate security protocols. This work underscores the imperative of bridging the technology-healthcare gap to foster secure, patient/provider-centered telehealth as the prevailing practice. It also emphasizes the need to synergize security, privacy, and usability to securely deliver care through telehealth.

Multi-cloud applications have become ubiquitous in today's organizations. Multi-cloud applications are being deployed across cloud service provider platforms to deliver services to all aspects of business. With the expansive use of multi-cloud environments, security is at the forefront of concerns when deploying and managing access to multi-cloud applications and the expanded attack surface of these applications. Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in multi-cloud environments that expose privileged information to inevitable attack.

Interactions in healthcare, by necessity, involve sharing sensitive information to achieve high-quality patient outcomes. Therefore, sensitive data must be carefully protected. This article explores existing privacy and security research conducted in the context of healthcare organizations. We conducted a systematic literature review of N =1,553 articles that examine the security and privacy of healthcare data and focus on 80 articles addressing human factors. Key findings show that much of the healthcare security and privacy research is focused on technology (44.11%, 712 articles), with a lack of emphasis on the human element (4.96%, 80 articles). In the subset of user studies, we find that patients and the general public express concerns about privacy and security with technologies like electronic health records (EHRs). Furthermore, our analysis shows that healthcare professionals often have low awareness of risks related to data security. Additionally, our analysis revealed that most research focuses narrowly on large hospitals, neglecting private practices and the unique challenges they face. We conclude by identifying research gaps and providing potential solutions to enable robust data security for sensitive patient data.

Incident response playbooks provide step-by-step guidelines to help security operations personnel quickly respond to specific threat scenarios. Although playbooks are common in the security industry, they have not been empirically evaluated for effectiveness. This paper takes a first step toward measuring playbooks and the frameworks used to design them, using two studies conducted in an enterprise environment. In the first study, twelve security professionals created two playbooks each, using two standard playbook design frameworks; the resulting playbooks were evaluated by experts for accuracy. In the second, we observed five personnel using the created playbooks in no-notice threat exercises within a live security-operations center. We find that playbooks can help simplify and support incident response efforts. However, playbooks designed using the frameworks we examined often lack sufficient detail for real-world use, particularly for more junior technicians. We provide recommendations for improving playbooks, playbook frameworks, and organizational processes surrounding playbook use.

In this paper, we correlate human characteristics with cyber security behavior intentions. While previous papers have identified correlations between certain human traits and specific cyber security behavior intentions, we present a comprehensive study that examines how risk-taking preferences, decision-making styles, demographics, and personality traits influence the security behavior intentions of device securement, password generation, proactive awareness, and updating. To validate and expand the work of Egelman and Peer, we conducted a survey of 369 students, faculty, and staff at a large public university and found that individual differences accounted for 5%–23% of the variance in cyber security behavior intentions. Characteristics such as financial risk-taking, rational decision-making, extraversion, and gender were found to be significant unique predictors of good security behaviors. Our study revealed both validations and contradictions of related work in addition to finding previously unreported correlations. We motivate the importance of studies such as ours by demonstrating how the influence of individual differences on security behavior intentions can be environment-specific. Thus, some security decisions should also depend on the environment.