Track: Doctoral Dissertation Competition

Abstract

A phishing email is a crime where a scammer sends an email to get sensitive data.  Every day phishing email attacks impact billions of people worldwide.  Understanding the factors that lead to phishing email clicks is essential to combat this threat.  Another area that targets email clicks is email marketing, a commercial message sent to people by email. This work considers that scammers can be using email marketing techniques in phishing emails. However, little or no research was developed to investigate if the factors that impact email marketing clicks can also impact phishing email clicks.  In this research, we developed the Persuasive Usability Framework (PUF), designed with the best practices of marketing and phishing.  Now, we want to determine which factors included in PUF have a significant effect on phishing email click rates.  To address the research problem, we will survey 400 participants in a role-play job function in which they review emails and process sensitive information.  We expect this research to contribute to understanding the factors that significantly affect phishing email CR, which is relevant for training people to identify phishing emails better.