An Overview of Phishing Victimization: Human Factors, Training and the Role of Emotions

TL;DR

This paper reviews how emotional factors influence phishing victimization and compares security approaches and training methods to mitigate this cyber threat.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of emotional influences on phishing and synthesizes security strategies and training practices from major sources.

Findings

Emotions significantly impact phishing susceptibility.

Training effectiveness varies across different security organizations.

Phishing types are categorized based on psychological manipulation techniques.

Abstract

Phishing is a form of cybercrime and a threat that allows criminals, phishers, to deceive end users in order to steal their confidential and sensitive information. Attackers usually attempt to manipulate the psychology and emotions of victims. The increasing threat of phishing has made its study worthwhile and much research has been conducted into the issue. This paper explores the emotional factors that have been reported in previous studies to be significant in phishing victimization. In addition, we compare what security organizations and researchers have highlighted in terms of phishing types and categories as well as training in tackling the problem, in a literature review which takes into account all major credible and published sources.