Workplace Phishing

About the Project

Various forms of digital deception make use of a variety of camouflage techniques. Phishing caught our interest for just this reason. How do you decide what phone calls are legitimate? When you get a text from an unknown number saying it’s a friend, what’s your next step? Has your boss ever told you to follow-up on an email you think is a scam? We are inundated by messages every day, and we have to develop strategies in order to assess and then handle them. There are many factors beyond IT/security education that inform how we approach computer-mediated messages—malicious and benign, wanted and unwanted. In this project, we take a user-centered approach to find out more about how employees navigate the nefarious activity of phishing.

This project is a collaboration with Jacob Abbott, Ashley Bochner, Sanchari Das, and Anne C. Tally.

Publications

Published | Tally, A. C., Abbott, J., Bochner, A., Das, S., & Nippert-Eng, C. (2023). What Mid-Career Professionals Think, Know, and Feel About Phishing: Opportunities for University IT Departments to Better Empower Employees in Their Anti-Phishing Decisions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW1), 1-27.

Published | Tally, A. C., Abbott, J., Bochner, A. M., Das, S., & Nippert-Eng, C. (2023, April). Tips, Tricks, and Training: Supporting Anti-Phishing Awareness among Mid-Career Office Workers Based on Employees’ Current Practices. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank our participants for their time and feedback, which made this research possible. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped to clarify and strengthen these papers. Thank you to Timothy Kelley, Oscar Lemus, and Emily Meanwell for their wonderful advice and contributions as well. Finally, we would like to thank the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington for its support.