The Impact of Workload on Phishing Susceptibility: An Experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phishing is when social engineering is used to deceive a person into sharing sensitive information or downloading malware.Research on phishing susceptibility has focused on personality traits, demographics, and design factors related to the presentation of phishing.There is very little research on how a person's state of mind might impact outcomes of phishing attacks.We conducted a scenario-based in-lab experiment with 26 participants to examine whether workload affects risky cybersecurity behaviours.Participants were tasked to manage 45 emails for 30 minutes, which included 4 phishing emails.We found that, under high workload, participants had higher physiological arousal and longer fixations, and spent half as much time reading email compared to low workload.There was no main effect for workload on phishing clicking, however a post-hoc analysis revealed that participants were more likely to click on task-relevant phishing emails compared to non-relevant phishing emails during high workload whereas there was no difference during low workload.We discuss the implications of state of mind and attention related to risky cybersecurity behaviour.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".