Why will most people ignore the pop-up display of a serious security warning?

A lot of people seem to ignore the message about security which appears suddenly when using the PC. This is mostly due to poor timing of the appearance of security messages, and the ability to greatly improve the probability of response to security messages by changing the timing can be greatly improved by researchers at Brigham Young University in collaboration with Google Chrome engineers It has been made clear.

Information Systems Research: INFORMS
http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/isre.2016.0644

| Brigham Young University
https://news.byu.edu/news/most-people-disregard-security-warnings-when-they-pop-our-computer-screen-why-they-come-bad

Researchers at Brigham Young University worked with Chrome developers to test how users respond to security messages. In this survey, we know that most people ignore security warnings.

According to the survey results, 74% of people disregarded the pop-up type security indication at the timing of closing the web page, and 79% ignored the message when watching the movie. Furthermore, 87% of people ignored the message when trying to send a message etc.


Many people ignore security warning despite serious messages are considered to be in "multitasking". So farVarious research, We know that the human brain is not good at multitasking to deal with more than two things at the same time and that performance is greatly impaired during multitasking. In other words, it is natural in a sense to avoid performance degradation by avoiding multitasking that the human brain is not good at, so even if you are asked for another work during some work, Because of the natural reason that it tends to refuse, security warnings are ignored.

Actually, when examining the state of the brain using fMRI, as compared with the case where a security message is displayed when not performing any task, a security message is displayed when something different task is being executed It has been confirmed that the activity of the neural network of the brain has decreased when it was done.


As mentioned above, since the cause of ignoring security warnings is in multitasking, the problem solving method is extremely simple, so that it is possible to display security advertisement aiming at a state where the user is not working anything It is effective. In fact, in a collaborative research between Brigham Young University and Chrome engineers, security messages are more frequent in three timings: "When you finish watching a movie" "When waiting for page loading" "When you finish web surfing" It was understood that the person of the most paid attention.

Although this result is natural in a sense, it is said that many software engineers are making it appear in ruffles without worrying about the timing of warning indication at all. Therefore, paying attention to the timing of displaying security messages, Professor Bonnie Anderson at Brigham Young University says that more effective security warnings can be made.