“Alexa, What’s a Phishing Email?”: Training users to spot phishing emails using a voice assistant

This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:EURASIP Journal on Information Security Vol. 2022; no. 1; pp. 7 - 13
Main Authors: Sharevski, Filipo, Jachim, Peter
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 22.11.2022
Springer Nature B.V
SpringerOpen
Subjects:
Alexa
Communications Engineering
Cybercrime
Effectiveness
Engineering
Networks
Phishing
Phishing training
Principles
Security Science and Technology
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
Systems and Data Security
Training
User training
Voice
Voice assistants
Phishing training
Alexa
Voice assistants
ISSN:2510-523X, 1687-4161, 2510-523X, 1687-417X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction with users, we developed an interaction-based phishing training focused on the principles of persuasion with examples on how to look for them in phishing emails. To test the effectiveness of this training, we conducted a between-subject study where 120 participants were randomly assigned in three groups: no training, interaction-based training with Alexa, and a facts-and-advice training and assessed a vignette of 28 emails. The results show that the participants in the interaction-based group statistically outperformed the others when detecting phishing emails that employed the following persuasion principles (and/or combinations of): authority, authority/scarcity, commitment, commitment/liking, and scarcity/liking. The paper discusses the implication of this result for future phishing training and anti-phishing efforts.
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ISSN:2510-523X
1687-4161
2510-523X
1687-417X
DOI:10.1186/s13635-022-00133-w