Profile of Likely E-mail Phishing Victims Emerges in Human Factors/Ergonomics Research
From the webpage:
The author of a paper to be presented at the upcoming 2013 International Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting has described behavioral, cognitive, and perceptual attributes of e-mail users who are vulnerable to phishing attacks. Phishing is the use of fraudulent e-mail correspondence to obtain passwords and credit card information, or to send viruses.
In “Keeping Up With the Joneses: Assessing Phishing Susceptibility in an E-mail Task,” Kyung Wha Hong, Christopher M. Kelley, Rucha Tembe, Emergson Murphy-Hill, and Christopher B. Mayhorn, discovered that people who were overconfident, introverted, or women were less able to accurately distinguish between legitimate and phishing e-mails. She had participants complete a personality survey and then asked them to scan through both legitimate and phishing e-mails and either delete suspicious or spam e-mails, leave legitimate e-mails as is, or mark e-mails that required actions or responses as “important.”
“The results showed a disconnect between confidence and actual skill, as the majority of participants were not only susceptible to attacks but also overconfident in their ability to protect themselves,” says Hong. Although 89% of the participants indicted they were confident in their ability to identify malicious e-mails, 92% of them misclassified phishing e-mails. Almost 52% in the study misclassified more than half the phishing e-mails, and 54% deleted at least one authentic e-mail.
I would say that “behavioral, cognitive, and perceptual attributes” are a basis for identifying users. Or at least a certain type of users as a class.
Or to put it another way, a class of users is just as much a subject for discussion in a topic map as any of user individually.
It may be more important, either for targeting users for exploitation or protection to treat them as a class than as individuals.
BTW, these attributes don’t sound amenable to IRI identifiers or binary assignment choices.