Use of Persuasive Technology to Change End-Users- IT Security Aware Behaviour: A Pilot Study

Persuasive technology has been applied in marketing, health, environmental conservation, safety and other domains and is found to be quite effective in changing people’s attitude and behaviours. This research extends the application domains of persuasive technology to information security awareness and uses a theory-driven approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a web-based program developed based on the principles of persuasive technology to improve the information security awareness of end users. The findings confirm the existence of a very strong effect of the webbased program in raising users’ attitude towards information security aware behavior. This finding is useful to the IT researchers and practitioners in developing appropriate and effective education strategies for improving the information security attitudes for endusers. Keywords—Information security, persuasive technology, IT security-aware behaviour, theory of planned behaviour survey.