The Problem

I Know, But That's A Lot

Regardless of end-users cyber hygiene awareness, most still practice poor cyber hygiene. We discovered that actual cyber hygiene practices overwhelm technology end-users. Users often choose the "easy" route, increasing their risk of exploitation. Danger!

Cyberattacks are evolving around the world. These attacks result in the interruption of businesses and government operations and lead to financial loss and reputation damage for both organizations and individuals. Cyber hygiene has become a prominent method for protecting against cyber threats.

But, most of the cyber hygiene tasks are tedious, and end-users lose interest in best cyber hygiene practices over time. These practices demand attention to detail and a lot of effort; this demand gives users a headache. End-users feel overwhelmed with these practices, so they decide to use shortcuts, which results in poor cyber hygiene and weakens their cybersecurity posture. For example, cyber hygiene best practices recommend strong passwords, but these passwords are hard to remember, so users reuse passwords for multiple accounts. Manually examining an email for phishing indications demands concentrated attention; it's time-consuming, and human error put in this task is critical.

Cyber hygiene exhaustion results in poor cyber hygiene practices; these practices result in poor cybersecurity and increase cyber risks for everyone. A successful attack is more likely to occur, and a single attack costs money and reputation. The Hacker News website confirms human error is the number one cybersecurity threat. IchyA makes humans cyborgs. This reality means that our market size is enormous, and we expect growth as the number of technology consumers increases year by year.

The IchyA is an innovative product that resolves users’ feelings of intimidation by cyber hygiene practices, minimizes human errors, and adds to the knowledge of best cyber hygiene practices in a friendly way. There is no doubt that our potential customers will pay to have our product.

The Design Thinking Process

With the Human-Centered Design Mindsets, we went through essential design thinking steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. During the empathy phase, we conducted empathy interviews with diverse people. We were able to identify people’s frustrations, difficulties, level of understanding, and common mistakes about cyber hygiene. Then, we asked ourselves, “how might we help those people.” The main question was: how might we relieve the feeling of overwhelmingness about cyber hygiene to end-users and, at the same time, enhance their cybersecurity? Through the brainstorming, the idea of an intelligent cyber hygiene assistant evolved. That was in the ideation phase. Our partners, software developers, are working on the prototype. The application will come in a beta version first to test it. This process is iterative; we will repeat those phases as needed.

Building Empathy

By communicating with our interviewees, we focused on verbal and non-verbal communication. This focus helped us understand that our potential clients are overwhelmingly intimidated by cyber hygiene practices. Some of them didn’t understand how cyber hygiene works, and they all tended to use shortcuts to alleviate their pain by sacrificing their cybersecurity posture.

Responding to a question, Sharron said, “I know what cyber hygiene is, but it requires substantial efforts to achieve.” “I use my mother’s name as a password because it is easy to remember,” said Jannette. We felt a strong desire to help millions of people starving with cyber hygiene best practices, putting ourselves in their shoes.

How can we sustain better cyber hygiene practices while reducing users' overwhelmingness? The Cyber Hygiene Assistant is the response.

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