Abstract
Cybersecurity education must explain how awareness is associated with willingness to enact protective practices while maintaining a clear distinction between intentions and verified behavior. This study examines a Cisco-oriented awareness–appraisal–intention framework using 385 completed primary-survey records reported as collected from technology users in Bangladesh. Protection motivation theory motivates two parallel appraisal pathways between cybersecurity awareness and secure-practice intention. The analysis combines measurement diagnostics, standardized composite-score regression with heteroskedasticity-consistent inference, 10,000 bootstrap resamples, and ten repetitions of ten-fold cross-validation. Awareness is positively associated with threat appraisal and coping appraisal. In the intention equation, awareness, threat appraisal, and coping appraisal have coefficients of 0.213, 0.197, and 0.273, respectively, with R-squared of 0.294. The two indirect associations are 0.077 and 0.124, but their difference is uncertain. The full model reduces held-out root mean squared error from 0.473 to 0.400 on the original five-point scale. Internal consistency is low across all four scales, and substantial discriminant-validity problems limit confirmatory interpretation. Accordingly, the reported associations are exploratory evidence from the analyzed survey records, not proof of causal mechanisms or actual secure behavior. The findings motivate improved instrument validation, task-specific security measurement, and longitudinal evaluation.