“Alexa, What’s a Phishing Email?”: Training users to spot phishing emails using a voice assistant

Abstract This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient in...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Filipo Sharevski, Peter Jachim
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2022-11-01
Series:EURASIP Journal on Information Security
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s13635-022-00133-w
Description
Summary:Abstract This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction with users, we developed an interaction-based phishing training focused on the principles of persuasion with examples on how to look for them in phishing emails. To test the effectiveness of this training, we conducted a between-subject study where 120 participants were randomly assigned in three groups: no training, interaction-based training with Alexa, and a facts-and-advice training and assessed a vignette of 28 emails. The results show that the participants in the interaction-based group statistically outperformed the others when detecting phishing emails that employed the following persuasion principles (and/or combinations of): authority, authority/scarcity, commitment, commitment/liking, and scarcity/liking. The paper discusses the implication of this result for future phishing training and anti-phishing efforts.
ISSN:2510-523X