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Phishing emails have certain characteristics, including wording related to urgency and unrealistic promises (i.e., “too good to be true”), that attempt to lure victims. To test whether these characteristics affected users’ suspiciousness of emails, users participated in a phishing judgment task in which we manipulated 1) email type (legitimate, phishing), 2) consequence amount (small, medium, large), 3) consequence type (gain, loss), and 4) urgency (present, absent). We predicted users would be most suspicious of phishing emails that were urgent and offered large gains. Results supporting the hypotheses indicate that users were more suspicious of phishing emails with a gain consequence type or large consequence amount. However, urgency was not a significant predictor of suspiciousness for phishing emails, but was for legitimate emails. These results have important cybersecurity-related implications for penetration testing and user training.
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Phishing Email Detection Using Robust NLP Techniques
Even with many successful phishing email detectors, phishing emails still cost businesses and individuals millions of dollars per year. Most of these models seem to ignore features like word count, stopword count, and punctuations; they use features like n-grams and part of speech tagging. Previous phishing email research ignores or removes the stopwords, and features relating to punctuation only count as a minor part of the detector. Even with a strong unconventional focus on features like word counts, stopwords, punctuation, and uniqueness factors, an ensemble learning model based on a linear kernel SVM gave a true positive rate of 83% and a true negative rate of 96%. Moreover, these features are robustly detected even in noisy email data. It is much easier to detect our features than correct part-of-speech tags or named entities in emails.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1659755
- PAR ID:
- 10137609
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7 to 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Phishing emails are scam communications that pretend to be something they are not in order to get people to take actions they otherwise would not. We surveyed a demographically matched sample of 297 people from across the United States and asked them to share their descriptions of a specific experience with a phishing email. Analyzing these experiences, we found that email users' experiences detecting phishing messages have many properties in common with how IT experts identify phishing. We also found that email users bring unique knowledge and valuable capabilities to this identification process that neither technical controls nor IT experts have. We suggest that targeting training toward how to use this uniqueness is likely to improve phishing prevention.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW.2018.00009
