Fishing for phishers. Improving Internet users' sensitivity to visual deception cues to prevent electronic fraud Moreno Fernández, María Manuela Blanco Bregón, Fernando Garaizar, Pablo Matute, Helena Phishing Internet security Easy-to-hard effect Human-computer interaction Discrimination learning Visual discrimination Phishing is a form of electronic fraud in which attackers attempt to steal sensitive information by posing as a legitimate entity. To maintain the attack unnoticed, phishers typically use fake sites that accurately mimic real ones. However, there are usually subtle visual discrepancies between these spoof sites and their legitimate counterparts that may help Internet users to identify their deceptive nature. Among all the potential visual cues, we choose to focus on typography, because it is often hard for phishers to use exactly the same font as in the original website. Thus, Experiment 1 assessed the effectiveness of visual discrimination training to help people detect typographical discrepancies between fake and legitimate websites. Results showed higher sensitivity to differences when undergraduate students were previously trained with easier versions of the discrimination task (i.e., involving more noticeable differences in typography) than when they were trained with the dif cult target discrimination from the start (easy-to- hard effect). These results were replicated with a broader and more representative sample of anonymous Internet users in Experiment 2. Implications for the design of strategies to prevent electronic fraud are discussed. 2025-01-30T10:18:19Z 2025-01-30T10:18:19Z 2017 journal article Moreno-Fernández, M. M., Blanco, F., Garaizar, P., & Matute, H. (2017). Fishing for phishers. Improving the discriminative abilities of Internet users to prevent electronic fraud. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 421–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.044 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/101216 10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.044 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional ELSEVIER