Document Type

Dissertation

Rights

This item is available under a Creative Commons License for non-commercial use only

Disciplines

1.2 COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

Publication Details

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Technological University Dublin for the degree of M.Sc. in Computing (Security and Forensics) 2017.

Abstract

Phishing attacks have increased rapidly and caused many drastic damages and losses for internet users‟ .The purpose of this research is to investigate on effectiveness of phishing education and training to help users identify different forms of phishing threats. The study has been conducted through developing a phishing quiz mobile application which includes four kinds of phishing threats. It tested the ability of users to recognize spoofed emails, SMS phishing (SMshing), scam phone calls (Vishing), and phishing through social media networks. A comprehensive literature review was discussed to investigate on the research area, understand the research problem, support the proposed research work and identify the research gap to contribute in the body of knowledge. The aim of the study is to measure users‟ ability of recognizing phishing threats and evaluate the effectiveness of online anti-phishing educational materials. To achieve this objective, a phishing quiz mobile application has been designed to conduct pre- and post-test experiment to see if there is a significant difference in mean pre- and post-results of participants after phishing education and training materials. The study also addressed the phishing quiz mobile application design and its contents. The research findings revealed that the results of 43 subjects after imparting phishing education to participants, there observed no significant change in the test results. The research discussed factors that may affect the results e.g. difficulty in understanding the phishing educational materials. However, further investigation is needed to tackle these problems and several of avenues for further research are considered.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/D7DK8T


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