Automatically Measuring Phishing Victim Susceptibility from Publicly Available Information
Principal Investigator: Keith S. Jones, Texas Tech University
Co-Principal Investigator: Akbar Siami Namin, Department of Computer Science, Texas Tech University
Years of Award: 2020-2023
Managing Service Agency: Office of Naval Research
Project Description:
This project will develop a system that measures users’ phishing susceptibility from publicly available information about those users (e.g., the organization’s Web site, individual’s social media, etc.). To do so, we will accomplish four research objectives: Objective 1): Develop a large phishing susceptibility data set, Objective 2): Determine the best set of phishing susceptibility predictors, Objective 3): Identify and evaluate publicly available data about model factors, and Objective 4): Develop a prototype and test its effectiveness against truth data.
The project will make several important contributions. Specifically, our research will be the first to 1) identify the set of variables that best predicts an individual’s phishing susceptibility, 2) identify and evaluate the availability and quality of publicly available sources of data about phishing susceptibility predictors, and 3) develop a working prototype, which will crawl relevant Web sites, extract information related to the phishing susceptibility predictors from those Web sites, and calculate a phishing susceptibility score for individuals.