Title
Does domain highlighting help people identify phishing sites?
Abstract
Phishers are fraudsters that mimic legitimate websites to steal user's credenfitial information and exploit that information for identity theft and other criminal activities. Various anti-phishing techniques attempt to mitigate such attacks. Domain highlighting is one such approach recently incorporated by several popular web browsers. The idea is simple: the domain name of an address is highlighted in the address bar, so that users can inspect it to determine a web site's legitimacy. Our research asks a basic question: how well does domain highlighting work? To answer this, we showed 22 participants 16 web pages typical of those targeted for phishing attacks, where participants had to determine the page's legitimacy. In the first round, they judged the page's legitimacy by whatever means they chose. In the second round, they were directed specifically to look at the address bar. We found that participants fell into 3 types in terms of how they determined the legitimacy of a web page; while domain highlighting was somewhat effective for one user type, it was much less effective for others. We conclude that domain highlighting, while providing some benefit, cannot be relied upon as the sole method to prevent phishing attacks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1978942.1979244
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
popular web browser,web page,web site,phishing attack,basic question,legitimate web,help people,domain name,user type,address bar,credenfitial information,identity theft,phishing,web pages
World Wide Web,Internet privacy,Address bar,Domain name,Phishing,Web page,Computer science,Identity theft,Exploit,Legitimacy,Technical report
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
30
1.15
12
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eric Lin1301.15
Saul Greenberg27804714.47
Eileah Trotter3301.15
David Ma4542.02
John Aycock535133.03