Toward improving university students awareness of spam email and cybercrime: Case study of Jordan

Abstract

Spam emails are rapidly increasing on a daily base. An attacker could attract the email users to open spam and click on the embedded links that could takes him to malicious Web pages. We tried to inspect the awareness and the attitude of college students in three main Universities in Jordan. As total, 600 students from educational, science and IT colleges were surveyed. Although most of the students who participated in the study were offensive towards the spam email and cybercrimes, few participants do nothing against it. The students' major plays important role in increasing the awareness against the spam emails and cybercrimes. Moreover, we investigated three main factors as we thought it could attract the students to open and read the spam emails that could lead them to be a victim of cybercrimes. These factors are technological, social, economical and religious. The participation in this study was voluntary, only the students who have the willingness to participate in our study fill the survey. The result shows that some of the educational major participants are seldom use their email accounts, while others have some knowledge on spam emails and cybercrimes, yet they may get stimulated to follow certain emails. Those participants are more vulnerable to cybercrimes. Towards the end, we condensed a research direction and recommendations to rise up user's awareness and arm them well to the battle with spam emails and cybercrimes.