Alerting consciences to reduce cybercrime: a quasi-experimental design using warning banners

OBJECTIVE: Aiming to reduce distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by alerting the consciences of Internet users, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of four warning banners displayed as online ads (deterrent—control, social, informative, and reorienting) and the contents of their two linked landing pages. METHODS: We implement a 4 × 2 quasi-experimental design on a self-selected sample of Internet users to measure the engagement generated by the ads and the pages. Engagement is measured on the ads as the ratio of clicks to impressions and on the pages as percentage of page scrolled, average session duration, video interaction rate, and URLs click rate. RESULTS: Social ads generate significantly more engagement than the rest with low to medium effect sizes. Data reveal no differences in engagement between both landing page designs. CONCLUSIONS: Social messages may be a better alternative for engaging with potential cyber offenders than the traditional deterrent messages. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11292-022-09504-2.