Mouse Behavior as an Index of Phishing Awareness

Phishing attacks are one of the most common security challenges faced by individuals and organizations today. Although many techniques exist to filter out phishing emails, they are not always effective leaving humans as the most vulnerable links in the information security chain. This paper presents a study investigating how human behavior, especially mouse movements, may reflect cybersecurity awareness, in particular to phishing emails. Using an email sorting task, we examined three key mouse movement features: hover, slow movement, and response time. The results suggest that slow mouse movements indicate high awareness of phishing emails and could be used to determine the likelihood of users falling victim to phishing attacks. However, contrary to intuition, response time and mouse hovering behaviors do not correlate with phishing awareness.

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