TITLE:
Trust, Risk, and Investment Confidence in Defensive Cyber Deception Adoption
AUTHORS:
Daniel Ward
KEYWORDS:
Cyber Deception, Cybersecurity Investment, Investment Confidence, Operational Technology, Risk Perception, Technology Adoption, Trust
JOURNAL NAME:
Technology and Investment,
Vol.17 No.3,
August
7,
2026
ABSTRACT: Defensive cyber deception technologies use decoys, honeytokens, simulated services, and false artifacts to create high-confidence signals when adversaries interact with resources that legitimate users should not touch. Although these tools are often discussed as technical controls, their adoption also depends on investment confidence: whether practitioners believe the capability is valuable, trustworthy, controllable, and worth organizational resources. This study examines that problem using secondary analysis of an existing deidentified survey dataset collected from industrial control system and operational technology professionals. The analysis tested whether investment confidence, self-efficacy/direct experience, social validation, and instructional support predicted adoption readiness and effective utilization beyond education, experience, and sector. The complete-case sample for the primary regression was 264. Demographics alone explained little variance in adoption readiness, R-squared = 0.026, p = 0.225. Adding perception-based predictors increased explained variance to R-squared = 0.639, p p