User experiences of TORPEDO: TOoltip-poweRed Phishing Email DetectiOn

•TORPEDO is a concept using just-in-time and just-in-place tooltips to help people judge embedded links.•The concept's effectiveness was investigated in an online study.•TORPEDO outperforms the standard Thunderbird status bar representation.•TORPEDO was implemented as Thunderbird add-on.•A seco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers & security 2017-11, Vol.71, p.100-113
Main Authors: Volkamer, Melanie, Renaud, Karen, Reinheimer, Benjamin, Kunz, Alexandra
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer Science
Cybercrime
Cybersecurity
Datavetenskap
Electronic mail systems
Email
Field study
Phishing
Phishing detection
Studies
Thunderbird
Tooltips
Trustworthiness
Usable security
User experience
User interfaces
User studies
Websites
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Summary:•TORPEDO is a concept using just-in-time and just-in-place tooltips to help people judge embedded links.•The concept's effectiveness was investigated in an online study.•TORPEDO outperforms the standard Thunderbird status bar representation.•TORPEDO was implemented as Thunderbird add-on.•A second study was conducted to investigate the general usability of this add-on and to receive feedback. We propose a concept called TORPEDO to improve phish detection by providing just-in-time and just-in-place trustworthy tooltips. These help people to identify phish links embedded in emails. TORPEDO's tooltips contain the actual URL with the domain highlighted. Link activation is delayed for a short period, giving the person time to inspect the URL before they click on a link. Furthermore, TORPEDO provides an information diagram to explain phish detection. We evaluated TORPEDO's effectiveness, as compared to the worst case “status bar” as provided by other Web email interfaces. People using TORPEDO performed significantly better in detecting phishes and identifying legitimate emails (85.17% versus 43.31% correct answers for phish). We then carried out a field study with a number of TORPEDO users to explore actual user experiences of TORPEDO. We conclude the paper by reporting on the outcome of this field study and suggest improvements based on the feedback from the field study participants.
ISSN:0167-4048
1872-6208
1872-6208
DOI:10.1016/j.cose.2017.02.004