Major
Computer Science
Anticipated Graduation Year
2023
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Phishing is a cyber-attack that uses deception to obtain personal identifiable information from individuals or corporations. These attacks are disguised as trustworthy sources, such as a bank, and convey an urgent situation that the recipient ‘must’ address thorough providing PII. Recipients are told to click on a link that provides a fraudulent website to enter PII and/or download malicious malware. Phishing attacks were the number one reported internet scam in 2022 and accounted for $52 million reported loss [1]. The total amount lost to these scams increased by 48% [1] suggesting that scammers are adapting their phishing scams to increase revenue. Our research questions were: What personal characteristics increase vulnerability to phishing and how might that information inform new measures to spread phishing attack awareness and to prevent successful phishing attacks?
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Eric Chan-Tin Computer Science Department, Dr. Loretta Stalans Criminal Justice and Criminology and of Psychology, Shelia Kennison Oklahoma State University
Supported By
NSF Grant
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
An Experiment on Why You Are Vulnerable To Online Phishing Scams
Phishing is a cyber-attack that uses deception to obtain personal identifiable information from individuals or corporations. These attacks are disguised as trustworthy sources, such as a bank, and convey an urgent situation that the recipient ‘must’ address thorough providing PII. Recipients are told to click on a link that provides a fraudulent website to enter PII and/or download malicious malware. Phishing attacks were the number one reported internet scam in 2022 and accounted for $52 million reported loss [1]. The total amount lost to these scams increased by 48% [1] suggesting that scammers are adapting their phishing scams to increase revenue. Our research questions were: What personal characteristics increase vulnerability to phishing and how might that information inform new measures to spread phishing attack awareness and to prevent successful phishing attacks?