An Evaluation of User Awareness for the Detection of Phishing Emails

Phishing attacks are among the most serious Internet criminal activities. They aim to make Internet users believe that they are using a trusted entity, for the purpose of stealing sensitive information, such as bank account or credit card information. Phishing costs Internet users millions of dollars each year. An effective method that can prevent such attacks is improving the security awareness of Internet users, especially in light of the significant growth of online services. This paper discusses a real-world experiment, which aims to analyze and monitor the phishing awareness of an organization’s users in order to improve their awareness. The experiments have been targeting 1500 users in the education sector. The results of the experiment reveal that phishing awareness has a significant positive effect on users’ ability to distinguish phishing emails and websites, thereby avoiding attacks.