Folk Models of Home Computer Security

Home computer systems are vulnerable because many users do not exactly know how to protect them. Even though there is a huge computer security industry which provides many security solutions, users still remain vulnerable. It is neither the user’s nor the software’s fault, more a combination of both: users who are not able to correctly use the security software. In order to make security software more usable and hence computers more secure, we re-ran the study by Wash about “Folk Models of Home Computer Security”. As a result we discovered 11 ”models” whereas eight of them are similar to the original ones and three have not been mentioned before. Those models can be devided into models for various kinds of viruses and models related to different types of hackers. In this paper we describe each folk model and illustrate how users think about computer security. Finally we give a short overview about security advices recommended by security experts in relation to the folk models. ACM Classification