  Cyber-attacks have become as commonplace as the Internet itself. Each year,
industry reports, media outlets and academic articles highlight this increased
prevalence, spanning both the amount and variety of attacks and cybercrimes. In
this article, we seek to further advance discussions on cyber threats,
cognitive vulnerabilities and cyberpsychology through a critical reflection on
the social and psychological aspects related to cyber-attacks. In particular,
we are interested in understanding how members of the public perceive and
engage with risk and how they are impacted during and after a cyber-attack has
occurred. This research focuses on key cognitive issues relevant to
comprehending public reactions to malicious cyber events including risk
perception, protection motivation, culture, and attacker characteristics (e.g.,
attacker identity, target identity and scale of attack). To consider the
applicability of our findings, we investigate two significant cyber-attacks
over the last few years, namely the WannaCry attack of 2017 and the Lloyds
Banking Group attack in the same year.
