  While specific aesthetic philosophies may differ across cultures, all human
societies have used aesthetics to support communication and learning. Within
the fields of usability and usable security, aesthetics have been deployed for
such diverse purposes as enhancing students' e-learning experiences and
optimising user interface design. In this paper, we seek to understand how
individual users perceive the visual assets that accompany cyber security
information, and how these visual assets and user perceptions underwrite a
distinct \emph{cyber security aesthetic}. We ask, (1) What constitutes cyber
security aesthetics, from the perspective of an individual user? and (2) How
might these aesthetics affect users' perceived self-efficacy as they informally
learn cyber security precepts? To begin answering these questions, we compile
an image-set from cyber security web articles and analyse the distinct visual
properties and sentiments of these images.
