Geopolitical tensions, international conflicts, and wars exacerbated an increasing threat to organizations and society. A more connected world, advances in digitalization, and greater dependence on information systems (IS) leveraged part of the conflicts into cyberspace (Sen et al. 2022). The attackers’ professionalization increased the threat by recruiting IT experts to carry out sophisticated cyber attacks (Kotsias et al. 2023). The steadily increasing number of cyber attacks and data breaches emphasizes this. Figure 1 shows the increased threat situation. US data breaches increased from 2014 to 2023 by 246 % (Clearinghouse 2023). Furthermore, experts believe the expected financial damage caused by cyber attacks will rise from 9 trillion to over 13 trillion US dollars over the next four years (Statista 2024). These statistics usually neglect indirect or immaterial damage, such as increased stress among cybersecurity employees (Singh et al. 2023), the loss of company market value (Rosati et al. 2017; Schatz and Bashroush 2016), deteriorated customer relationships (Janakiraman et al. 2018), and other side effects. As a result, hacker attacks have become a major concern for organizations (Li and Chen 2022).
Business & Information Systems Engineering, Vol. 67, pp. 141-147,
2025
