The design of phishing studies: Challenges for researchers

Parsons, Kathryn; McCormac, Agata; Pattinson, Malcolm R.; Butavicius, Marcus A.; Jerram, Cate

doi:10.1016/j.cose.2015.02.008

Cited by 80 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…There are some vulnerabilities in human cognition which help attackers in deceiving people. Researchers in [23] categorized emails based on their intention into four groups: (1) Risk or Loss (2) Benefit or Gain (3) Account Information and (4) Information Only. The first category uses the sense of urgency and panic to make people click on a link and expose their sensitive information.…”

Section: E Human Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: A Comprehensive Reexamination of Phishing Research From the Security Perspective

Das

Baki

Aassal

et al. 2020

IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials

108

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Phishing and spear phishing are typical examples of masquerade attacks since trust is built up through impersonation for the attack to succeed. Given the prevalence of these attacks, considerable research has been conducted on these problems along multiple dimensions. We reexamine the existing research on phishing and spear phishing from the perspective of the unique needs of the security domain, which we call security challenges: real-time detection, active attacker, dataset quality and baserate fallacy. We explain these challenges and then survey the existing phishing/spear phishing solutions in their light. This viewpoint consolidates the literature and illuminates several opportunities for improving existing solutions. We organize the existing literature based on detection techniques for different attack vectors (e.g., URLs, websites, emails) along with studies on user awareness. For detection techniques we examine properties of the dataset, feature extraction, detection algorithms used, and performance evaluation metrics. This work can help guide the development of more effective defenses for phishing, spear phishing and email masquerade attacks of the future, as well as provide a framework for a thorough evaluation and comparison.

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Section: E Human Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: A Comprehensive Reexamination of Phishing Research From the Security Perspective

Das

Baki

Aassal

et al. 2020

IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The layout of e-commerce and banking sites is almost similar in different languages. Heuristics based phishing detection techniques [54,69,86,87] use the keywords, and they are language dependent. As we discussed, some of the visual feature based techniques [48,71] can detect this attack because they utilise the webpage features like the logo of the company, CSS Structure, DOM tree, and so forth.…”

Section: Open Issues and Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phishing Detection: Analysis of Visual Similarity Based Approaches

Jain

Gupta

2017

Security and Communication Networks

147

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Phishing is one of the major problems faced by cyber-world and leads to financial losses for both industries and individuals. Detection of phishing attack with high accuracy has always been a challenging issue. At present, visual similarities based techniques are very useful for detecting phishing websites efficiently. Phishing website looks very similar in appearance to its corresponding legitimate website to deceive users into believing that they are browsing the correct website. Visual similarity based phishing detection techniques utilise the feature set like text content, text format, HTML tags, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), image, and so forth, to make the decision. These approaches compare the suspicious website with the corresponding legitimate website by using various features and if the similarity is greater than the predefined threshold value then it is declared phishing. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of phishing attacks, their exploitation, some of the recent visual similarity based approaches for phishing detection, and its comparative study. Our survey provides a better understanding of the problem, current solution space, and scope of future research to deal with phishing attacks efficiently using visual similarity based approaches.

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“…Interventions that increase attention or effort have sometimes been found to increase sensitivity. For example, Parsons and colleagues found that telling users that they were being evaluated for their phishing detection ability increased their sensitivity without changing their response bias . Wolfe and colleagues observed an increase in sensitivity during high base rate training trials .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Setting Priorities in Behavioral Interventions: An Application to Reducing Phishing Risk

Canfield

Fischhoff

2017

Risk Analysis

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Phishing risk is a growing area of concern for corporations, governments, and individuals. Given the evidence that users vary widely in their vulnerability to phishing attacks, we demonstrate an approach for assessing the benefits and costs of interventions that target the most vulnerable users. Our approach uses Monte Carlo simulation to (1) identify which users were most vulnerable, in signal detection theory terms; (2) assess the proportion of system-level risk attributable to the most vulnerable users; (3) estimate the monetary benefit and cost of behavioral interventions targeting different vulnerability levels; and (4) evaluate the sensitivity of these results to whether the attacks involve random or spear phishing. Using parameter estimates from previous research, we find that the most vulnerable users were less cautious and less able to distinguish between phishing and legitimate emails (positive response bias and low sensitivity, in signal detection theory terms). They also accounted for a large share of phishing risk for both random and spear phishing attacks. Under these conditions, our analysis estimates much greater net benefit for behavioral interventions that target these vulnerable users. Within the range of the model's assumptions, there was generally net benefit even for the least vulnerable users. However, the differences in the return on investment for interventions with users with different degrees of vulnerability indicate the importance of measuring that performance, and letting it guide interventions. This study suggests that interventions to reduce response bias, rather than to increase sensitivity, have greater net benefit.

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The design of phishing studies: Challenges for researchers

Cited by 80 publications

References 23 publications

SoK: A Comprehensive Reexamination of Phishing Research From the Security Perspective

SoK: A Comprehensive Reexamination of Phishing Research From the Security Perspective

Phishing Detection: Analysis of Visual Similarity Based Approaches

Setting Priorities in Behavioral Interventions: An Application to Reducing Phishing Risk

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