communication enhancement could be applicable to
almost any area. For example, in phishing attacks via
email, the warning message could be displayed by the
operating system when certain patterns are detected
in the email content. Obviously, one drawback to this
approach is that the number of warning messages
could significantly increase, and finding the right
balance could be another challenge to face.
Ultimately, we do not want to sacrifice security to
jeopardize the user’s experience.
4.3 Limitations and Future Research
Our study has several limitations. Firstly, we were
unable to identify the users who downloaded the
application. This limits our findings as a better
understanding of who they are, their technical skills,
experience, etc. could bring more precision to the
results. We suggest that future studies might
incorporate this aspect and attempt to understand how
people’s background, cultural aspects, etc. affect their
overall software use. Secondly, we used an online
open-source repository to place our application.
While many of these repositories are labeled as
trusted, often they are limited to medium to advanced
users, as novice users do not have sufficient technical
skills to use these websites. This could have some
limitations in terms of the results as it could be
expected that novice users would be more inclined to
abandon their software use immediately rather than
continuing. Overall, we suggest that future studies
should build on the restrictive deterrence theory and
use the C-HIP model to further theorize how different
aspects of the C-HIP model interact with the
restrictive deterrence premises. It could be
interesting, for instance, to understand how attention
and comprehension are related to the frequency of
repeated software use.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The effectiveness of warnings in influencing users’
behaviors when using low-trust (potentially
malicious) software has not been adequately
addressed by prior research. This study represents a
first attempt to illustrate the way in which warnings
can reduce the frequency and the duration of low-trust
software use. These results are particularly interesting
for IT managers as they suggest that the use of non-
approved software could be reduced in frequency, or
completely abandoned, in the presence of warning
messages, so that security incidents could be better
mitigated and reduced.
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