Lending a Hand: The Effectiveness of Support Systems in Assisting Users to Detect Phishing Attacks
Schiller K, Scheidt J, Adamsky F, Benenson Z (2026)
Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2026
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
Conference Proceedings Title: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
Event location: Barcelona, ESP
ISBN: 9798400722783
Abstract
We investigate the effectiveness of anti-phishing support systems through a quantitative study involving 453 participants. To this end, we developed a tool that allows participants to immerse themselves in a realistic setting, tasked with classifying emails as either phishing or legitimate, while being assisted by support systems. Despite the prevalence of support systems in webmailers and email clients, our results indicate no significant difference in correctly assessing emails of varying difficulty between these systems and the control group. We found a minor negative effect of the support system that uses tooltips compared to other support systems. In the subsequent survey, we found that the support systems are appreciated and considered helpful by users, as supported by the results of the UEQ-S, even if they have no observable effect. Email context, such as the contact list, as well as hovering over the links, had stronger effects on the classification than the tested support systems.
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Germany (DE)How to cite
APA:
Schiller, K., Scheidt, J., Adamsky, F., & Benenson, Z. (2026). Lending a Hand: The Effectiveness of Support Systems in Assisting Users to Detect Phishing Attacks. In Nuria Oliver, David A. Shamma, Heloisa Candello, Pablo Cesar, Pedro Lopes, Alessandro Bozzon, Thomas Kosch, Vera Liao, Xiaojuan Ma, Valentino Artizzu, Fiona Draxler, Gustavo Lopez, Anke V. Reinschluessel, Xin Tong, Phoebe O. Toups Dugas (Eds.), Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. Barcelona, ESP: Association for Computing Machinery.
MLA:
Schiller, Katharina, et al. "Lending a Hand: The Effectiveness of Support Systems in Assisting Users to Detect Phishing Attacks." Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026, Barcelona, ESP Ed. Nuria Oliver, David A. Shamma, Heloisa Candello, Pablo Cesar, Pedro Lopes, Alessandro Bozzon, Thomas Kosch, Vera Liao, Xiaojuan Ma, Valentino Artizzu, Fiona Draxler, Gustavo Lopez, Anke V. Reinschluessel, Xin Tong, Phoebe O. Toups Dugas, Association for Computing Machinery, 2026.
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