Jasmin Schwab (German Aerospace Center (DLR)), Alexander Nussbaum (University of the Bundeswehr Munich), Anastasia Sergeeva (University of Luxembourg), Florian Alt (University of the Bundeswehr Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), and Verena Distler (Aalto University)

Organizations depend on their employees’ long-term cooperation to help protect the organization from cybersecurity threats. Phishing attacks are the entry point for harmful followup attacks. The acceptance of training measures is thus crucial. Many organizations use simulated phishing campaigns to train employees to adopt secure behaviors. We conducted a preregistered vignette experiment (N=793), investigating the factors that make a simulated phishing campaign seem (un)acceptable, and their influence on employees’ intention to manipulate the campaign. In the experiment, we varied whether employees gave prior consent, whether the phishing email promised a financial incentive and the consequences for employees who clicked on the phishing link. We found that employees’ prior consent positively affected the acceptance of a simulated phishing campaign. The consequences of “employee interview” and “termination of the work contract” negatively affected acceptance. We found no statistically significant effects of consent, monetary incentive, and consequences on manipulation probability. Our results shed light on the factors influencing the acceptance of simulated phishing campaigns. Based on our findings, we recommend that organizations prioritize obtaining informed consent from employees before including them in simulated phishing campaigns and that they clearly describe their consequences. Organizations should carefully evaluate the acceptance of simulated phishing campaigns and consider alternative anti-phishing measures.

View More Papers

Secure Data Analytics in Apache Spark with Fine-grained Policy...

Byeongwook Kim (Seoul National University), Jaewon Hur (Seoul National University), Adil Ahmad (Arizona State University), Byoungyoung Lee (Seoul National University)

Read More

CounterSEVeillance: Performance-Counter Attacks on AMD SEV-SNP

Stefan Gast (Graz University of Technology), Hannes Weissteiner (Graz University of Technology), Robin Leander Schröder (Fraunhofer SIT, Darmstadt, Germany and Fraunhofer Austria, Vienna, Austria), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

Read More

Repurposing Neural Networks for Efficient Cryptographic Computation

Xin Jin (The Ohio State University), Shiqing Ma (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

Read More

Speak Up, I’m Listening: Extracting Speech from Zero-Permission VR...

Derin Cayir (Florida International University), Reham Mohamed Aburas (American University of Sharjah), Riccardo Lazzeretti (Sapienza University of Rome), Marco Angelini (Link Campus University of Rome), Abbas Acar (Florida International University), Mauro Conti (University of Padua), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University), Selcuk Uluagac (Florida International University)

Read More