Toward Predicting Susceptibility to Phishing Victimization on Facebook

Abstract

Social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, have become part of everyday use. While many individuals and organizations use SNSs to maintain contact and to do a variety of services, attackers may see them as a prime target for performing different types of attacks. Phishing is one of the most common attacks, and one of the most challenging problems in SNSs. Existing human behaviours literature related to social capital, habitual usage, and risk perception shows a strong indication that it is possible to predict Facebook users' susceptibility to phishing victimization based on their demographics, anonymity, social capital, and risk perception. Using quantitative survey, this paper aims to predict Facebook users' susceptibility to phishing victimization based on these factors. Among the hypothesized factors, we found that it is possible to predict user's susceptibility to phishing victimization based on the user's anonymity status, the number of all friends the user is connected to, the number of strangers that the user is connected to, and the number of close friends that the user is connected to.