Presenting Suspicious Details in User-Facing E-mail Headers Does Not Improve Phishing Detection

Authors: 

Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker, UCL

Abstract: 

Phishing requires humans to fall for impersonated sources. Sender authenticity can often be inferred from e-mail header information commonly displayed by e-mail clients, such as sender and recipient details. People may be biased by convincing e-mail content and overlook these details, and subsequently fall for phishing. This study tests whether people are better at detecting phishing e-mails when they are only presented with user-facing e-mail headers, instead of full e-mails. Results from a representative sample show that most phishing e-mails were detected by less than 30% of the participants, regardless of which e-mail part was displayed. In fact, phishing detection was worst when only e-mail headers were provided. Thus, people still fall for phishing, because they do not recognize online impersonation tactics. No personal traits, e-mail characteristics, nor URL interactions reliably predicted phishing detection abilities. These findings highlight the need for novel approaches to help users with evaluating e-mail authenticity.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {281236,
author = {Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker},
title = {Presenting Suspicious Details in {User-Facing} E-mail Headers Does Not Improve Phishing Detection},
booktitle = {Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-30-4},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {253--271},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2022/presentation/zheng},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video