Individual Processing of Phishing Emails: Towards a Phishing Detection Framework

Abstract

There is a prevailing prejudice that technology can solve all problems in many fields, including cybercrime. Still, recent reports of increasing data breaches have shown that this belief is not always true. This paper investigated social engineering scenarios, particularly phishing attacks, to analyze the psychological deception schemes used by attackers alongside the heuristics that affect users' vulnerability. Indeed, the authors explain how hackers use various technical tools besides certain psychological factors to design clever and successful attacks against businesses or individuals. This research provides a decision-making framework for e-mail processing; it consists of several verification stages covering cognitive and technical factors that help users identify inconsistencies and different classes of phishing. Furthermore, it supports the security awareness field with a reliable framework that has demonstrated promising results and low false positives. The solution aims to reduce phishing threats and help organizations establish security-conscious behavior among their employees.