Dr. Alec Cram awarded $223K in National Cybersecurity Consortium funding for human-centric cybersecurity research project

The School of Accounting and Finance is proud to announce that Dr. Alec Cram, has been awarded $223,529 in funding over the next three years through the National Cybersecurity Consortium’s (NCC) 2025 Call for Proposals. His project, titled “May We Have Your Attention Please? Exploring How Employee Attention Influences Cybersecurity Behaviour” falls under the research and development category and aims to address a critical challenge in organizational cybersecurity.

In today’s fast-paced organizational environments, employees are inundated with competing priorities across business, operational and administrative tasks. Despite ongoing efforts to raise cybersecurity awareness, lapses in attention continue to result in costly and disruptive cyber incidents. Dr. Cram’s research takes a human-centric approach to this challenge, aiming to understand and improve how employees engage with their cybersecurity responsibilities.

As Principal Investigator, Dr. Cram, who is also a member of the University of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI), is joined by two research associates: Dr. John D’Arcy from the University of Delaware and Dr. Alexander Benlian from TU Darmstadt. Together, the team will develop practical tools, frameworks and guidelines aimed at helping Canadian organizations identify and address attention-related vulnerabilities. Their work will also contribute to academic research and education through the development of teaching case studies for university classrooms.

This funding is part of the NCC’s broader initiative to strengthen Canada’s cybersecurity ecosystem, with a dedicated $20.9 million distributed across 31 projects nationwide. We congratulate Dr. Cram and his team on this exciting achievement and look forward to the impact their work will have on both research and practice.