Towards understanding phishing victims' profile

Abstract

Today it is known that the weakest link in the cyber security chain is the computer user. Social engineering attacks are commonly used to deceive computer users to perform actions that could leak private information. Such attacks psychologically manipulate the computer users to reveal his/her confidential information. Therefore, the computer user has been carefully studied by security researchers to understand the relationship between cyber security incidents and the victim background. In this paper, we present a breadth-first survey of recent studies that aim to understand the relationship between victims' backgrounds and phishing attacks. We summarize the characteristics of the phishing victims, following a review of their demographic and personality traits.