The Effectiveness of Education and Fear Appeal to Prevent Spear Phishing Attacks

Spear phishing is one of the most popular types of social engineering attacks. The attacker designs it using the personal data acquired from various sources, such as their social media accounts. This attack exploits human vulnerabilities to cause financial losses, network compromises, and loss of login credentials. This quantitative research employed protection motivation theory (PMT) to analyze how education and fear appeals affect users' ability to identify spear phishing attempts. The study had 726 participants assigned randomly into four groups—education intervention, fear appeal intervention, combined education and fear appeal intervention, and control group. The study was conducted as online experiments managed via the Qualtrics platform. The participants benefited from these interventions and then completed the spear phishing test, and PMT constructs questions. The results showed no statistically significant variations in the mean test for these four groups. However, the PMT finding revealed that the high effect of threat vulnerability, self-efficacy, and the low effect of response cost can enhance the participants’ knowledge of spear phishing attacks. The findings also suggest that further study is required to design an effective intervention program that would significantly improve users' knowledge regarding spear phishing attacks.