A federated learning-based globally coordinated cyber hygiene framework for individual users

Cyber hygiene refers to the policies and practices governing the access, retrieval, and consumption of data and information by individual users, small and medium businesses, and large corporations. However, users, both individual and corporate, have been guilty of not practicing basic cyber hygiene, resulting in inadvertent financial losses, data theft, and security breaches. Thus, cyber hygiene enforcement is non-trivial, as poor cyber hygiene can potentially compromise even sophisticated security frameworks and tools. For a large number of individual users, the challenge is severely exacerbated, as they remain outside the scope of sophisticated security frameworks, making them susceptible to incidents of ransomware and other cyber attacks. Existing research has not adequately addressed the security concerns for individual users, focusing on simple tools, awareness, and advisories to address the security challenges. This research paper proposes a comprehensive cyber hygiene framework, focusing on real-time advisory for better cyber hygiene, combined with a globally coordinated federated learning framework for real-time threat detection and response formulation. The framework ensures that individual users stay protected from new emerging threats on a continuous basis. Experimental results establish the efficacy of the proposed framework.