Phishy Pages - the Design of a User-Interactive Website for Phishing Attack Evaluation

Author

Evan C. Gregory, University of MississippiFollow

Date of Award

Spring 5-10-2025

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Computer and Information Science

First Advisor

Charles Walter

Second Advisor

Christopher Burger

Third Advisor

Timothy Holston

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

Phishing attacks are a widespread, malicious phenomenon. These attacks steal people’s personal information, causing them ruin and lining the pockets of criminals. What makes them so dangerous is that they come in a variety of forms, including emails, websites, phone calls, and social media can be vectors for attackers. Fortunately, these attacks can be stopped by informing potential victims of common signs to look out for. Training is one of the best methods people use to teach web-users how to protect themselves. To train them, however, users must be taken through many examples of phishing attacks to learn the characteristics that are common among different phishing attacks and give away their illegitimacy. This thesis examines the creation and design of one potential training method, a website, that takes users through a series of phishing attack examples. The content shown to the user displays a multitude of characteristics, known as degradations and sophistications, that can either help or hurt someone’s ability to determine if the “attack” is trustworthy or not. The eighteen selected examples are taken from a list of legitimate and fabricated examples of phishing attacks, with a focus on emails and websites, as these are two common attack vectors. Some of the examples are not malicious in content, and are meant to see if a user is actually analyzing the content or even if they’re seeing characteristics that are not actually there. After examining a potential phishing attack, the user rates its trustworthiness on a five digit Likert scale, before making a final trust decision. The design of the site itself is designed to be user-friendly, especially for people of less technologically savvy backgrounds

Researchers can access the answers given by users through an administrator page, which has a table that displays a user’s answers for each example, as well as the overall trust score and trustworthiness in a graph.

Recommended Citation

Gregory, Evan C., "Phishy Pages - the Design of a User-Interactive Website for Phishing Attack Evaluation" (2025). Honors Theses. 3236.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3236

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