An Exploration of Phishing Information Sharing: A Heuristic-Systematic Approach

Phishing is an attempt to acquire sensitive information from a user by malicious means. The losses due to phishing have exceeded a trillion dollars globally. Social media has provided an alternate to sharing information about phishing online. However, very little attention has been paid to phishing information sharing on social media. In this paper, we explore the risk characteristics of phishing information on social media, and investigate its effect on people’s sharing of information regarding phishing. We address the research questions: (a) how do people decide which phishing information to share? (b) what aspects of phishing information are more or less consequential in influencing a user to share it? The findings suggest that the phishing messages that afford coping strategies, and come from users with higher credibility are likely to achieve higher level of sharing