The Effect of Training on Phishing Email Identification and Whether this Differs Between Males and Females.

Katie Tipling. 2015

Abstract
This study aimed to test whether training in the identification of a phishing email can help a person to identify them more efficiently. Other aims were included in this research to test whether the gender of the person can affect their susceptibility to the training and also to identify if gender is an initial factor in phishing email identification, before any training has commenced, It was hypothesized that males would perform better than females in both instances, but both genders would improve with training. A final aim is to test whether the number of emails a person receives on any given day affects their likelihood to fall for phishing scams. It was hypothesized that people who receive more emails a day would perform worse in the initial stages of the study. Participants were asked to complete a simple phishing task to identifying how genuine an email was using a Likert scale from 1-7. They completed responses for 20 emails (10 real, 10 fake) then were given a training sheet providing information on identifying phishing emails. They then did the initial task again, with a different set of emails. A total of 18 participants were used and it was found that gender had no effect on participant’s performance, however participants were better at completing the task after training. Furthermore, the number of emails they received also had no effect on performance.