Phishing Vulnerability Compounded by Older Age, APOE4 Genotype, and Lower Cognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With technological advancements, financial exploitation tactics have expanded into the online realm. Older adults may be particularly susceptible to online scams due to age- and Alzheimer’s Disease-related changes in cognition. In this study, 182 adults ranging from 18-90 years underwent cognitive assessment, genotyping for apolipoprotein E e4 (APOE4), and completed the lab-based Short Phishing Email Suspicion Test (S-PEST) as well as the real-life PHishing Internet Task (PHIT). Across both paradigms, older age predicted heightened susceptibility to phishing, with this enhanced susceptibility pronounced among older APOE4 allele carriers with lower working memory. Additionally, performance in both phishing tasks was correlated, in that reduced ability to discriminate between phishing and safe emails in S-PEST predicted greater phishing susceptibility in PHIT. The current study introduces S-PEST as an easy-to-administer, ecologically valid tool for assessing phishing susceptibility and identifies older age, APOE4, and lower cognition as risk factors of phishing vulnerability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".