Is Cybersecurity a Social Responsibility?

Waqas Nawaz Khan (), Jae Kyu Lee () and Shan Liu ()
Additional contact information
Waqas Nawaz Khan: Xi’an Jiaotong University
Jae Kyu Lee: Xi’an Jiaotong University
Shan Liu: Xi’an Jiaotong University

Information Systems Frontiers, 2025, vol. 27, issue 4, No 3, 1367-1391

Abstract: Abstract Cybersecurity incidents damage not only the organizations attacked, but also society in general, harming customers and stakeholders. Through the text mining of the incident database, we observed that the impact of cybersecurity incident trends became more outward-oriented causing increased risks associated with social responsibility. Thus, this study aims to validate the potential effect of cybersecurity incidents on social responsibility risks and stock price drops. To derive meaningful factors from the description of incidents, we mined the texts to extract the features of the severity of incidents and their direction of impact whether inward or outward. The severity score is derived from sentiment analysis and the impact direction by topic modeling and machine learning models including SVM, LSTM, and BERT. The effects of these incident features are studied through regression models with social responsibility risk and stock price drops as dependent variables. To conduct this study, we collected incident texts from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse database, and social responsibility risk indices from the Privacy and Data Security index and Cyber Risk Rating scores. The subsequent short-term stock price drops are measured by Cumulative Abnormal Returns and their variations. Our analysis revealed a profound impact of cybersecurity incidents on social responsibility risk indices and stock price drops with the moderating effect of outward impact in both models. However, we recognize the incompatibility between an annual index of social responsibility risk and short-term stock price drops. Therefore, we propose a short-term social responsibility risk index for cybersecurity which can be derived from the disclosed incidents. All these scenarios support the premise that cybersecurity incidents significantly impact the social responsibility risk and may lead to potential stock price drops.

Keywords: Cybersecurity; Social responsibility; Outward incidents; Severity; Sentiment analysis; Stock price drops (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-024-10565-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:27:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s10796-024-10565-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-024-10565-z

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().