Alerting Users About Phishing Attacks

Cyber attacks are emerging as problems caused not only by technological aspects but also by human factors neglected when designing interactive systems. In this paper, we show how one of the most popular attacks on the Web, phishing, is very much related to UI aspects and how a wrong UI design determines a greater vulnerability of users. We performed a heuristic evaluation to assess the most recent applications such as browsers and mail clients that adopt warning messages as prevention of phishing attacks. The results highlighted that different aspects of UI should be better designed to limit phishing attacks. In addition, as a prevention of cyber attacks, we described an ongoing work of a questionnaire that aims to make users aware of the risks of cyber attacks.