An educational experiment in discovering spear phishing attacks

Sammanfattning: Background: Spear phishing attacks uses social engineering targeting a specific person to steal credential information or infect the users computer with malware. It is often done through emails and it can be very hard to spot the difference between a legitimate email and a scam email. Cybercrime is a growing problem and there is many ways to inform and educate individuals on the subject.Objectives: This study intends to perform an experiment to see if an educationalsupport tool can be used to better identify phishing emails. Furthermore see if there is a difference in susceptibility between students from different university programs. Methods: A qualitative research study was used to get the necessary understanding how to properly develop a phishing educational tool. A Pretest-Posttest experiment is done to see if there is an improvement in result between an experimental group that received education and the control group that did not. Results: The result shows an overall higher score for the technical program compared to the non-technical. Comparing the pretest with the posttest shows an increase in score for the non-technical program and a decrease in score for the technical program. Furthermore 58% of the non-technical students who started the test did not complete it. Conclusions: There is a noticeable difference in susceptibility between the programs for detecting scam emails for students. However further research is needed in order to explore to what extent the education process had an impact.