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Effective Notification Campaigns on the Web: A Matter of Trust, Framing, and Support

Maass, Max ; Stöver, Alina ; Pridöhl, Henning ; Bretthauer, Sebastian ; Herrmann, Dominik ; Hollick, Matthias ; Spiecker, Indra (2022)
Effective Notification Campaigns on the Web: A Matter of Trust, Framing, and Support.
30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21). Virtual event (11.-13.08.2021)
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00020574
Conference or Workshop Item, Secondary publication, Publisher's Version

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Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
Type of entry: Secondary publication
Title: Effective Notification Campaigns on the Web: A Matter of Trust, Framing, and Support
Language: English
Date: 2022
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Year of primary publication: 2021
Publisher: USENIX Association
Book Title: Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium
Event Title: 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21)
Event Location: Virtual event
Event Dates: 11.-13.08.2021
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00020574
Corresponding Links:
Origin: Secondary publication service
Abstract:

Misconfigurations and outdated software are a major cause of compromised websites and data leaks. Past research has proposed and evaluated sending automated security notifications to the operators of misconfigured websites, but encountered issues with reachability, mistrust, and a perceived lack of importance. In this paper, we seek to understand the determinants of effective notifications. We identify a data protection misconfiguration that affects 12.7 % of the 1.3 million websites we scanned and opens them up to legal liability. Using a subset of 4754 websites, we conduct a multivariate randomized controlled notification experiment, evaluating contact medium, sender, and framing of the message. We also include a link to a public web-based self-service tool that is run by us in disguise and conduct an anonymous survey of the notified website owners (N=477) to understand their perspective.

We find that framing a misconfiguration as a problem of legal compliance can increase remediation rates, especially when the notification is sent as a letter from a legal research group, achieving remediation rates of 76.3 % compared to 33.9 % for emails sent by computer science researchers warning about a privacy issue. Across all groups, 56.6 % of notified owners remediated the issue, compared to 9.2 % in the control group. In conclusion, we present factors that lead website owners to trust a notification, show what framing of the notification brings them into action, and how they can be supported in remediating the issue.

Status: Publisher's Version
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-205745
Additional Information:

Presentation: 11 slides

Classification DDC: 000 Generalities, computers, information > 004 Computer science
Divisions: 20 Department of Computer Science > Sichere Mobile Netze
DFG-Graduiertenkollegs > Research Training Group 2050 Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users
Date Deposited: 16 Feb 2022 13:11
Last Modified: 25 Nov 2022 08:13
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/20574
PPN: 491481829
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