An Analysis of User Behaviors in Phishing eMail using Machine Learning Techniques

Yi Li, Kaiqi Xiong, Xiangyang Li

2019

Abstract

Understanding user behaviors plays an important role in security situation assessments and computer system operations. There are very challenging and limited studies on email user behaviors. To study user behaviors related with phishing emails, we design and investigate an email test platform to understand how users behave differently when they read emails, some of which are phishing. We used a set of emails including phishing emails from the real world. We collect experimental data including participants’ basic background information, time measurement, and their answers to survey questions. We first check whether or not factors such as intervention, phishing types, and incentive mechanisms play a major role in user behaviors when phishing attacks occur. We then evaluate the significance of each attribute with a performance score. The performance score is a metric demonstrating how a user makes a correct judgment on phishing while phishing attacks occur. We propose a machine learning framework, which contains attribute reduction and 10-fold cross-validation, to predict the performance of a user based on our collected data.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Li Y., Xiong K. and Li X. (2019). An Analysis of User Behaviors in Phishing eMail using Machine Learning Techniques.In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 2: SECRYPT, ISBN 978-989-758-378-0, pages 529-534. DOI: 10.5220/0008119805290534

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt19,
author={Yi Li and Kaiqi Xiong and Xiangyang Li},
title={An Analysis of User Behaviors in Phishing eMail using Machine Learning Techniques},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 2: SECRYPT,},
year={2019},
pages={529-534},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008119805290534},
isbn={978-989-758-378-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 2: SECRYPT,
TI - An Analysis of User Behaviors in Phishing eMail using Machine Learning Techniques
SN - 978-989-758-378-0
AU - Li Y.
AU - Xiong K.
AU - Li X.
PY - 2019
SP - 529
EP - 534
DO - 10.5220/0008119805290534