Investigating Training and Priming to Combat Phishing on Instagram Shop

Abstract

Phishing attacks have been predominantly delivered through emails but have recently found new paths through social networking services (SNSs). Numerous methods to combat email phishing have been tested, but few have been tested to combat phishing on SNSs. The current study investigated the efficacy of in-app training and priming to combat phishing attacks on an SNS, the Instagram Shop. This study manipulated priming, training type, and advertisement type through a mixed experimental design. Participants were tasked to view Instagram Shop advertisements to rate how likely they would recommend the products to their boss along with their reasoning for their ratings. Results showed that the text-with-image training effectively enhanced the likelihood of recommending legitimate advertisements and not recommending phishing ones. Overall, this study shows that the training implemented aided Instagram users in appropriately recommending phishing and legitimate advertisements, although priming was not seen to have an effect toward this goal.