Asangi Jayatilaka (Centre for Research on Engineering Software Technologies (CREST), The University of Adelaide, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University), Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage (School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland), M. Ali Babar (Centre for Research on Engineering Software Technologies (CREST), The University of Adelaide)

Despite technical and non-technical countermeasures, humans continue to be tricked by phishing emails. How users make email response decisions is a missing piece in the puzzle to identifying why people still fall for phishing emails. We conducted an empirical study using a think-aloud method to investigate how people make ‘response decisions’ while reading emails. The grounded theory analysis of the in-depth qualitative data has enabled us to identify different elements of email users’ decision-making that influence their email response decisions. Furthermore, we developed a theoretical model that explains how people could be driven to respond to emails based on the identified elements of users’ email decision-making processes and the relationships uncovered from the data. The findings provide deeper insights into phishing email susceptibility due to people’s email response decision-making behavior. We also discuss the implications of our findings for designers and researchers working in anti-phishing training, education, and awareness interventions.

View More Papers

HEIR: A Unified Representation for Cross-Scheme Compilation of Fully...

Song Bian (Beihang University), Zian Zhao (Beihang University), Zhou Zhang (Beihang University), Ran Mao (Beihang University), Kohei Suenaga (Kyoto University), Yier Jin (University of Science and Technology of China), Zhenyu Guan (Beihang University), Jianwei Liu (Beihang University)

Read More

Kids, Cats, and Control: Designing Privacy and Security Dashboard...

Jacob Abbott (Indiana University), Jayati Dev (Indiana University), DongInn Kim (Indiana University), Shakthidhar Reddy Gopavaram (Indiana University), Meera Iyer (Indiana University), Shivani Sadam (Indiana University) , Shirang Mare (Western Washington University), Tatiana Ringenberg (Purdue University), Vafa Andalibi (Indiana University), and L. Jean Camp(Indiana University)

Read More

DEMASQ: Unmasking the ChatGPT Wordsmith

Kavita Kumari (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany), Alessandro Pegoraro (Technical University of Darmstadt), Hossein Fereidooni (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Read More