Evidence of personality traits on phishing attack menace among selected university undergraduates in Nigerian

Abstract

Access ease, mobility, portability, and improved speed have continued to ease the adoption of computing devices; while, consequently proliferating phishing attacks. These, in turn, have created mixed feelings in increased adoption and nosedived users’ trust level of devices. The study recruited 480-students, who were exposed to socially-engineered attack directives. Attacks were designed to retrieve personal data and entice participants to access compromised links. We sought to determine the risks of cybercrimes among the undergraduates in selected Nigerian universities, observe students’ responses and explore their attitudes before/after each attack. Participants were primed to remain vigilant to all forms of scams as we sought to investigate attacks’ influence on gender, students’ status, and age to perceived safety on susceptibility to phishing. Results show that contrary to public beliefs, age, status, and gender were not among the factors associated with scam susceptibility and vulnerability rates of the participants. However, the study reports decreased user trust levels in the adoption of these new, mobile computing devices.