Modest loss of sleep increases susceptibility to cybersecurity threats

Sleep restriction leads to impaired cognitive processing across domains. I examined whether the transition to daylight saving time (DST), typically accompanied by compromised sleep, would lead to an increase in the probability of falling prey to a simulated phishing attack using a fully naturalistic experiment with random assignment and blinding. A predatory email was sent to employees at the University of California, Irvine (N = 11,218) either on the morning of Monday following the transition to DST or one week earlier. The transition led to a ~13% increase in the probability of clicking a suspicious link, without affecting the probability of opening the email or reporting it as spam. These results demonstrate that even modest, mundane, and acute loss of sleep has real-life, potentially hazardous, implications for cognitive function.