Directing Users’ Attention to Combat Phishing Attacks

We conducted an MTurk online user study to assess whether directing users to attend to the address bar and the use of domain highlighting lead to better performance at detecting fraudulent webpages. 320 participants were recruited to evaluate the trustworthiness of webpages (half authentic and half fraudulent) in two blocks. In the first block, participants were instructed to judge the webpage's legitimacy by any information on the page. In the second block, they were directed specifically to look at the address bar. Webpages with domain highlighting were presented in the first block for half of the participants and in the second block for the remaining participants. Results showed that the participants could differentiate the legitimate and fraudulent webpages to a significant extent. When participants were directed to look at the address bar, correct decisions increased for fraudulent webpage s ("unsafe") but did not change for authentic webpages ("safe"). The percentage of correct judgments showed no influence of domain highlighting regardless of whether the decisions were based on any information on the webpage or participants were directed to the address bar. The results suggest that directing users' attention to the address bar is slightly beneficial at helping users detect phishing web pages, whereas domain highlighting gives almost no additional protection.