A Context-Aware Cybersecurity Lens for Information Systems Research

Cybersecurity research in information systems has traditionally focused on technical safeguards and organizational risk management. Yet contemporary threats emerge at the intersection of geopolitical tensions, AI-enabled information manipulation, and human decision-making under uncertainty. Existing approaches remain fragmented across technical, organizational, and societal domains. This theoretical paper introduces Context-Aware Cybersecurity (CAC) as an integrative lens that reconceptualizes cybersecurity as a multi-level socio-technical phenomenon whose effectiveness emerges from context alignment across three interdependent dimensions: geopolitical, organizational, and interaction context. Generative and agentic AI cut across all three as a cross-cutting transformation. Three ongoing research projects instantiate the framework empirically: SOSEC on geopolitical sentiment monitoring, MuDDi on organizational deepfake detection, and DeFaktS on explainable AI at the human-system interface. The paper offers an integrative lens for IS cybersecurity scholarship and outlines a research agenda for empirical, design-oriented, and theoretical work.