Phishing, Personality Traits and Facebook

TL;DR

This study explores how personality traits influence responses to phishing emails and Facebook privacy behaviors, revealing correlations with gender, neuroticism, and openness, and highlighting the complexity of predicting phishing susceptibility.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the relationship between Big Five personality traits and online vulnerability to phishing and privacy risks, integrating behavioral analysis across email and social media.

Findings

Gender influences phishing response rates.

Neuroticism correlates with phishing susceptibility.

Openness relates to more personal sharing and less privacy protection.

Abstract

Phishing attacks have become an increasing threat to online users. Recent research has begun to focus on the factors that cause people to respond to them. Our study examines the correlation between the Big Five personality traits and email phishing response. We also examine how these factors affect users behavior on Facebook, including posting personal information and choosing Facebook privacy settings. Our research shows that when using a prize phishing email, we find a strong correlation between gender and the response to the phishing email. In addition, we find that the neuroticism is the factor most correlated to responding to this email. Our study also found that people who score high on the openness factor tend to both post more information on Facebook as well as have less strict privacy settings, which may cause them to be susceptible to privacy attacks. In addition, our work detected no correlation between the participants estimate of being vulnerable to phishing attacks and actually being phished, which suggests susceptibility to phishing is not due to lack of awareness of the phishing risks and that realtime response to phishing is hard to predict in advance by online users. We believe that better understanding of the traits which contribute to online vulnerability can help develop methods for increasing users privacy and security in the future.