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Who falls for phish?: a demographic analysis of phishing susceptibility and effectiveness of interventions

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a roleplay survey instrument administered to 1001 online survey respondents to study both the relationship between demographics and phishing susceptibility and the effectiveness of several anti-phishing educational materials. Our results suggest that women are more susceptible than men to phishing and participants between the ages of 18 and 25 are more susceptible to phishing than other age groups. We explain these demographic factors through a mediation analysis. Educational materials reduced users' tendency to enter information into phishing webpages by 40% percent; however, some of the educational materials we tested also slightly decreased participants' tendency to click on legitimate links.

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  • (2025)What goes wrong during phishing education? A probe into a game-based assessment with unfavorable resultsEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10081552(100815)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Phishing: Gender Differences in Email Security Perceptions and BehaviorsCybersecurity Pedagogy and Practice Journal;10.62273/PELX29653:2(35-47)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Vulnerability of Students of Masaryk University to Two Different Types of PhishingApplied Cybersecurity & Internet Governance10.60097/ACIG/190268Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. mechanical turk
  2. phishing
  3. roleplay
  4. social engineering
  5. survey
  6. user behavior

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Cited By

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  • (2025)What goes wrong during phishing education? A probe into a game-based assessment with unfavorable resultsEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10081552(100815)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Phishing: Gender Differences in Email Security Perceptions and BehaviorsCybersecurity Pedagogy and Practice Journal;10.62273/PELX29653:2(35-47)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Vulnerability of Students of Masaryk University to Two Different Types of PhishingApplied Cybersecurity & Internet Governance10.60097/ACIG/190268Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Analysis Model at Sentence Level for Phishing DetectionMachine Learning Techniques and Industry Applications10.4018/979-8-3693-5271-7.ch004(73-89)Online publication date: 3-May-2024
  • (2024)Mitigating Phishing Threats in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Through Multi-Stage Defense StrategiesAnalyzing and Mitigating Security Risks in Cloud Computing10.4018/979-8-3693-3249-8.ch007(125-162)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Analysis Model at the Sentence Level for Phishing DetectionDeep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and the Rise of Intelligent Systems10.4018/979-8-3693-1738-9.ch011(209-227)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Phishing and the Human Factor: Insights from a Bibliometric AnalysisInformation10.3390/info1510064315:10(643)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Investigation of Phishing Susceptibility with Explainable Artificial IntelligenceFuture Internet10.3390/fi1601003116:1(31)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Risky online behaviors and cybercrime awareness among undergraduate students at Al Quds University: a cross sectional studyCrime Science10.1186/s40163-024-00230-w13:1Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Like Shooting Phish in a Barrel: Cue Utilization and Cognitive Reflection Aid Performance in Controlled, but Not Naturalistic Phishing TasksJournal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making10.1177/15553434241296170Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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