Guidelines for Developers and Recommendations for Users to Mitigate Phishing Attacks: An Interdisciplinary Research Approach

Phishing attacks are common these days. If successful, these attacks cause psychological, emotional, and financial damage to the victims. Such damages may have a long-term impact. The overall objective of this Ph.D. research is to contribute to mitigating phishing victimization risks by exploring phishing prevalence, user-related risk factors, and vulnerable target groups and by designing (1) guidelines for social website developers focused on internet user vulnerabilities and (2) recommendations for users to avoid such attacks. The Ph.D. research acknowledges that phishing attacks are technical in nature, while the impact is financial and psychological. Therefore, an interdisciplinary research approach focusing on empirical research methods from social sciences (i.e., focus groups and surveys) and computer science (i.e., data-driven techniques such as machine learning) is adopted for the research. In particular, we aim to use a machine learning model for data analytics and quantitative and qualitative research design for psychological analysis. The research outcome of this Ph.D. work is expected to provide recommendations for internet users and organizations developing social-media-based software systems through more phishing aware development practices.