Examining the Effectiveness of Speech and Earcon Alerts for Aiding Phishing Email Detection

As technology advances, phishing attacks grow more vicious. Anti-phishing research has primarily focused on visual cues like domain names and contents, leaving visually impaired individuals particularly vulnerable. Recent studies suggest incorporating auditory alerts to enhance the detection of phishing threats. As a first step toward designing more inclusive phishing alerts, the current study examines the effectiveness of two types of audio alerts on individuals with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Participants were randomly assigned to three alert conditions: control, earcon, and speech alert. Each participant went through 20 emails to indicate whether each email was legitimate. The results showed that participants in the two alert groups spent less time on each email than the control. Additionally, participants in the earcon condition showed a greater tendency to classify emails as phishing than those in the control condition. These results can inform the future development of auditory alerts for phishing.