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From Victims to Defenders: An Exploration of the Phishing Attack Reporting Ecosystem
Conference proceeding   Open access

From Victims to Defenders: An Exploration of the Phishing Attack Reporting Ecosystem

Zhibo Sun, Faris Bugra Kokulu, Penghui Zhang, Adam Oest, Gianluca Stringhini, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doupé and Gail-Joon Ahn
Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, pp 49-64
30 Sep 2024
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3678890.3678926View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Open Access via Drexel Libraries Read and Publish Program 2024CC BY V4.0 Open

Abstract

Security and privacy -- Human and societal aspects of security and privacy Security and privacy -- Human and societal aspects of security and privacy -- Usability in security and privacy
Reporting phishing attacks can significantly shorten the time required to take down their operations and deter further victimization by the same phishing websites. However, little research has been conducted to understand the phishing reporting ecosystem and its effectiveness. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the phishing reporting ecosystem to identify the critical challenges people face and their concerns when reporting smishing, vishing, and phishing email attacks. First, we analyze the existing security advice and channels for reporting phishing attacks in both the public and private sectors. Then, we conduct a scenario-based experiment involving 89 participants to investigate what factors affect a participant’s decision to report a phishing attack and what challenges they face in preparing the report. Third, we report phishing attacks ourselves and monitor the status of the reported phishing websites to empirically measure how reports are acted upon and how that affects the reported phishing websites. Finally, we propose approaches under five major concern categories to mitigate the challenges that we discover in the phishing reporting ecosystem.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Information Systems
Computer Science, Software Engineering
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