The aims of this secure email intervention are as follows:
1. To find out the frequencies of sent and received emails for academic and non- academic purposes during one day;
2. To find out whether there are differences between academic and non-academic emails in terms of frequency of emails attacks, and action taken against them; 3. To confirm the results of previous activities discussed in the previous Chapters;
7.3 Research questions
RQ 7.1: What is the frequency of emails access for academic and non-academic purposes?
RQ 7.1.1 What is the frequency of emails sent for academic and non-academic purposes?
RQ 7.1.2 What is the frequency of emails received for academic and non-academic purposes?
RQ 7.1.3 Are there any differences between the frequencies of academic and non- academic emails?
RQ 7.2: Are academic and non-academic emails different to each other with respect to email attacks?
RQ 7.2.1: Are there any differences in the frequencies of embedded links that originate in emails from academic and non-academic sources?
RQ 7.2.2: Are there any differences in the frequencies of spam emails that appear to be for academic and non-academic purposes?
RQ 7.2.3: Are there any differences in the number of phishing attacks that appear to be for academic and non-academic purposes?
RQ 7.3: Are there any differences in the rates of action taken against attacks in emails which appear to be for academic and other purposes?
RQ 7.3.1: Are there any differences in the rates of the ‗Ignored‘ action taken towards attacking emails which appear to be for academic and other purposes?
RQ 7.3.2: Are there any differences in the rates of the ‗Read & deleted‘ action taken towards attacking emails which appear to be for academic and other purposes? RQ 7.3.3: Are there any differences in the rates of the ‗Read & stored‘ action taken towards attacking emails which appear to be for academic and other purposes?
7.4 Hypotheses
H 7.4.1: Students access their email for non-academic purposes more frequently than for academic purposes.
H 7.4.2: Students receive more embedded links in emails that appear to be from non- academic sources than in emails that appear to be from academic sources.
H 7.4.3: Students receive more spam that appears to be from non-academic sources than from academic sources.
H 7.4.4: There are differences between the frequencies of received phishing emails which appear to be from academic and non-academic sources.
H 7.4.5: There are differences in the frequencies of ‗Ignore‘ responses taken against email attacks that appear to be from academic and non-academic sources.
H 7.4.6: There are differences in the frequencies of ‗Read and delete‘ responses taken against email attacks that appear to be from academic and non-academic sources.
H 7.4.7: There are differences in the frequencies of ‗Read and store‘ responses taken against email attacks that appear to be from academic and non-academic sources.
Main research questions
Sub-RQs Aims Hypotheses no.
Type of data analysis
RQ 7.1 RQ 7.1.1 1 N/A Descriptive
RQ 7.1.2 2 N/A Descriptive
RQ 7.1.3 2 H 7.4.1 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.2 RQ 7.2.1 3 H 7.4.2 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.2.2 3 H 7.4.3 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.2.3 3 H 7.4.4 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.3 RQ 7.3.1 3 H 7.4.5 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.3.2 3 H 7.4.6 Independent sample t-test
RQ 7.3.3 3 H 7.4.7 Independent sample t-test
7.5 Data collection methods
In this activity, an observation form was administered to the students in universities in both the United Kingdom (UK) and the Kingdom of Bahrain (BH) at the end of the semester, to record the email tracking of the students over a 24-hour period. An online form as shown in Figure 7.1 and paper-based forms as depicted in Figure 7.2, were used as observation forms. The universities were chosen for their convenience in terms of accessibility to the targeted students and the ease associated with administering the evaluation tools to them, based on the fact that the author serves as a faculty staff member at University of Bahrain and a doctoral student at Warwick University in UK.
In order to aid the observation experiment, an informal observation format was used, with the researcher observing each one of the students individually by Skype to communicate Table 7.1: Research questions and its hypotheses and their aims
with them for the purposes of ensuring that they complete the activity as requested or contact by emails.
Figure 7.1: Screen shot of the online email tracking form
Email tracking form
The main aim of the tracking form was to track students‘ email by observing the following:
Sent email
o Time the email was sent.
o Purpose of the email (academic, social, or business);
o Whether the email was signed or encrypted. Received email
o Time the email was received.
o Purpose of the email (academic, social, or business);
o Whether the email was signed or encrypted
o What attack (if any) was contained in the email (embedded link, spam, or phishing);
o For the same email, how the participants reacted (Read and stored, read and deleted, or ignored). These will be referred to as ―action taken‖ in the rest of the document.
Figure 7.2: Email tracking observation form
Participants
In order to conduct the intervention, the researcher selected 75 students from the University of Bahrain and 40 students from UK, all are from either University of Bahrain or the Warwick University. However, 7 students from UOB were not able to complete the feedback, bringing the total number of students who completed the feedback to 68 and only 35 students from Warwick University completed the feedback. The resulting sample is therefore only representative of students from the University of Bahrain and Warwick University. It was not feasible in this particular study to identify a representative sample of students across all the universities in each country as the researcher had originally designed. Logistically it would be difficult to do a similar exercise in different universities in Bahrain and the UK due to the difficulty of the experiment.