Abstract
Phishing attacks are among the most serious Internet criminal activities. They aim to make Internet users believe that they are using a trusted entity, for the purpose of stealing sensitive information, such as bank account or credit card information. Phishing costs Internet users millions of dollars each year. An effective method that can prevent such attacks is improving the security awareness of Internet users, especially in light of the significant growth of online services. This paper discusses a real-world experiment, which aims to analyze and monitor the phishing awareness of an organization’s users in order to improve their awareness. The experiments have been targeting 1500 users in the education sector. The results of the experiment reveal that phishing awareness has a significant positive effect on users’ ability to distinguish phishing emails and websites, thereby avoiding attacks.
Highlights
E-commerce and online services make our lives more comfortable and manageable, wherever we may be and at any time of day
We found that the number of participants who failed to detect the phishing email in the first experiment was sharply reduced in the second experiment, for two reasons
From the experiments presented in this paper and in [10], the results clearly showed a high and significant effect on users‟ phishing awareness, demonstrated by users correctly identifying a phishing email and thereby avoiding a phishing attack
Summary
E-commerce and online services make our lives more comfortable and manageable, wherever we may be and at any time of day This ubiquity of service carries with it a critical security threat, which can cost Internet users dearly. The FBI‟s Internet Crime Report for 2017 counts phishing attacks amongst the top three types of crime cited by victims of Internet crime, with losses of approximately 30 million dollars being recorded for that year. This number is likely to be much higher because not all attacks are reported
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