Modeling and Simulation of the Human Firewall Against Phishing Attacks in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals due to their limited cybersecurity budgets and lack of expertise. This paper proposes an alternative solution to the advanced but expensive security plan by employing a human firewall system. The system comprises a group of enduser agents with a cybersecurity expertise agent who can detect and prevent cyberattacks. We evaluate the proposed system’s effectiveness in mitigating cyber attack damage in SMBs using agent-based modeling and simulation. Our results show that if the end-user agents have above-average cybersecurity expertise and cybersecurity motivation, the proposed human firewall strategy can be a comparable or better defensive tactic than employing an advanced security plan. Our paper provides insights for SMBs on how to allocate their limited cybersecurity budgets to build a human firewall system to mitigate cyber attack damage.