EAGER: DCL: SaTC: Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Inoculation vs. education: the role of real time alerts and end-user overconfidence

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Phishing is increasingly problematic in today’s society. Phishing vulnerability is not limited to inexperienced persons. Even those with technological training fall victim to phishing attacks. The research question to be addressed in this project is whether inexperienced people and experts fall victim to phishing for different reasons, and if so, how those different sources of vulnerability might be addressed. Uncertainty and overconfidence, respectively, may characterize the phishing vulnerabilities of persons with less versus more computer literacy. The project team is studying phishing vulnerabilities, testing whether they characterize people with different expertise and confidence, and deploying interventions designed to address differently-caused phishing vulnerabilities. The main interventions to be evaluated include psychological inoculation, whereby people are exposed to repeated, weakened, and harmless phishing experiences, and educational techniques in the form of anti-phishing instructions. The first stage in the project is testing, through controlled experiments, whether people with varying computer literacy, and varying confidence, differ in their approach to phishing avoidance. The next stage is to study the impact of different interventions, including variations on psychological inoculation and anti-phishing instructions, and test how those interventions are associated with persons who vary in their expertise and confidence. A third step will be to develop and evaluate alerts that could be triggered by potential phishing attacks. The identification of at-risk people who could benefit from inoculation training or specialized instruction has the potential for mitigating phishing and many other kinds of attacks on people. A diverse set of students will be involved in the research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.