{"title":"\"Alexa, What's a Phishing Email?\": Training users to spot phishing emails using a voice assistant.","authors":"Filipo Sharevski, Peter Jachim","doi":"10.1186/s13635-022-00133-w","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction with users, we developed an <i>interaction-based phishing training</i> focused on the principles of persuasion with examples on how to look for them in phishing emails. To test the effectiveness of this training, we conducted a between-subject study where 120 participants were randomly assigned in three groups: no training, interaction-based training with Alexa, and a facts-and-advice training and assessed a vignette of 28 emails. The results show that the participants in the interaction-based group statistically outperformed the others when detecting phishing emails that employed the following persuasion principles (and/or combinations of): authority, authority/scarcity, commitment, commitment/liking, and scarcity/liking. The paper discusses the implication of this result for future phishing training and anti-phishing efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":46070,"journal":{"name":"EURASIP Journal on Information Security","volume":"2022 1","pages":"7"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9685029/pdf/","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EURASIP Journal on Information Security","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s13635-022-00133-w","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/11/22 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction with users, we developed an interaction-based phishing training focused on the principles of persuasion with examples on how to look for them in phishing emails. To test the effectiveness of this training, we conducted a between-subject study where 120 participants were randomly assigned in three groups: no training, interaction-based training with Alexa, and a facts-and-advice training and assessed a vignette of 28 emails. The results show that the participants in the interaction-based group statistically outperformed the others when detecting phishing emails that employed the following persuasion principles (and/or combinations of): authority, authority/scarcity, commitment, commitment/liking, and scarcity/liking. The paper discusses the implication of this result for future phishing training and anti-phishing efforts.
期刊介绍:
The overall goal of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security, sponsored by the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), is to bring together researchers and practitioners dealing with the general field of information security, with a particular emphasis on the use of signal processing tools in adversarial environments. As such, it addresses all works whereby security is achieved through a combination of techniques from cryptography, computer security, machine learning and multimedia signal processing. Application domains lie, for example, in secure storage, retrieval and tracking of multimedia data, secure outsourcing of computations, forgery detection of multimedia data, or secure use of biometrics. The journal also welcomes survey papers that give the reader a gentle introduction to one of the topics covered as well as papers that report large-scale experimental evaluations of existing techniques. Pure cryptographic papers are outside the scope of the journal. Topics relevant to the journal include, but are not limited to: • Multimedia security primitives (such digital watermarking, perceptual hashing, multimedia authentictaion) • Steganography and Steganalysis • Fingerprinting and traitor tracing • Joint signal processing and encryption, signal processing in the encrypted domain, applied cryptography • Biometrics (fusion, multimodal biometrics, protocols, security issues) • Digital forensics • Multimedia signal processing approaches tailored towards adversarial environments • Machine learning in adversarial environments • Digital Rights Management • Network security (such as physical layer security, intrusion detection) • Hardware security, Physical Unclonable Functions • Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for multimedia data • Private data analysis, security in outsourced computations, cloud privacy