Phish Finders

Malicious web content can include phishing emails, social media posts, and websites that imitate the look and feel of legitimate sites. Technology alone can't solve the problem of phishing victimization, which means that more research on human-centered prevention methods is needed. Supported by a grant from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Phish Finders aims to understand how citizen scientists like you perceive various types of phishing content.

In this project, we are asking citizen scientists to assess samples of online content. For each assessment, citizen scientists will be asked to identify indicators of phishing in emails and websites as well as to rate how aesthetically pleasing each sample is before making a final judgement to trust or not trust the sample. These judgments will let us compare answers to prior research, which shows that aesthetics influence trust, to evaluate reliability. Because we are not relying on experts like most of the current research generated in cybersecurity, the benefits of this research include helping researchers to better understand how people are victimized by malicious phishing content and how practice impacts ability to detect phishing, and generating a set of images for training systems to help people learn to avoid this type of victimization. Thank you for participating!