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Introduction
Many people worldwide possess one or more mobile devices since they have become more popular and affordable, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wearable devices (Delgado-Santos et al., 2022; Ezeamuzie et al., 2024). They can spend a lower price to gain high-quality mobile devices with high-speed processing, changing various information consumption habits of people, especially youths and students (Yu et al., 2022; Yip et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). Also, people spend more time using their mobile devices because they can provide multi-functions to satisfy their daily lives, such as gaming, processing documents, learning, watching videos, listening to music, browsing social media sites, and using instant messaging applications to communicate with others (Cheng et al., 2024; Dong et al., 2021; Fan et al., 2020; Lau et al., 2020). The recent development of smart cities (Chang and Abdel-Basset, 2022), classrooms (Zhu et al., 2023), and libraries (Khan et al., 2023; Wang, 2024) has further increased the usage of mobile devices.
Due to the above reasons, malicious individuals and organizations widely directed against their mobile devices to launch different levels of attack, for example, phishing attacks, spyware, network spoofing, malware, DDoS, and Botnet, to retrieve or steal useful personal information and data (Hui et al., 2024; Ho et al., 2021; Sheila et al., 2015). They can also retrieve a vast amount of personal information in various forms and for multiple purposes via the vulnerabilities of mobile device sensors (Delgado-Santos et al., 2022). With the recent development of the Internet of Things (IoT), end-users use more and more devices connected to their multiple mobile devices, which may involve increasing security knowledge to prevent hacking (Cheung et al., 2023). Therefore, mobile security is becoming increasingly important nowadays, and more people are concerned about their privacy and security on their mobile devices (Ho et al., 2021, 2023; Jiang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2021; Jain and Shanbhag, 2012).
Although young people and students are the most prevailing users of mobile devices, scant studies focus on university students' mobile information security awareness, especially in the Asia Pacific. In particular, students have increased their mobile device usage during the COVID-19 pandemic...