The Exploitation of Trust in Digital Media: Everyday Cybersecurity Risks and Forms of Individual Harm

As banking, public services, shopping, education, and social networking practices have become part of everyday digital life, cybersecurity needs to be examined beyond technical system security and also through individual harms and trust relations. While cybersecurity awareness is mostly addressed in the literature through technical precautions such as passwords, link checking, malicious software, and device security, the relationship between forms of individual harm and the exploitation of trust in public awareness materials has been examined only to a limited extent. This study examines which forms of individual harm everyday cybersecurity risks are associated with and through which mechanisms of trust exploitation these harms are constructed in ten web page awareness texts published by Siberay and ICTA/GüvenliWeb. Through directed qualitative content analysis, 105 meaning units were coded. The findings reveal that, at the level of main harm, loss of data and identity control comes to the fore; this is followed by psychological, economic, and privacy-related harms. The exploitation of trust operates through the exploitation of technical/platform trust, the use of uncertainty, the targeting of human vulnerability, and the violation of privacy expectations. The study proposes to evaluate cybersecurity awareness beyond technical skill, as a capacity to recognize how trust is produced, imitated, and exploited.