Modest loss of sleep increases susceptibility to cybersecurity threats.

Daylight saving time at the University of California, Irvine is linked to a ~13% increase in employees’ probability of clicking a suspicious link in a simulated phishing attack.

• Why it matters: The study addresses whether modest, acute sleep loss from DST translates into measurable vulnerability in real-world cybersecurity behavior.
• What they did: In a fully naturalistic, randomized, blinded experiment (N = 11,218), a predatory email was sent either on the Monday after DST or one week earlier, and outcomes were tracked.
• The result: DST increased link-clicking probability (~13%) but did not change opening the email or reporting it as spam, implying sleep loss selectively impairs threat detection.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.