Habituation effects in computer security warning

Security warning is a form of computer dialog communication used to inform the users on the risks of allowing random applications to run on a computer system. Accordingly, it is specifically designed to impersonate a legitimate security alerting function (e.g., notify, warn, and advice) to a user about the consequence effect of an action. However, most of the computer users tend to ignore those security warnings conveying the same message over and over again. This eventually leads to habituation. Considering the fact that there is a significant lack of focus paid to address this issue, the main objective of this article is to describe and summarize the related studies on users’ habituation to the security warnings. This article presents a systematic literature review to explore the current key issues, challenges, and the possible solutions related to habituation effects in security warnings. It is expected that this article could contribute to a more complete understanding of the habituation effects in security warnings and eventually bring benefits to the research communities or general publics.