Cybersecurity awareness: A critical analysis of education and law enforcement methods

Abstract

According to the international Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG), phishing activities have abruptly risen over the last few years, and users are becoming more susceptible to online and mobile fraud. Machine Learning techniques have potential for building technical anti-phishing models, with a handful already implemented in the real time environment. However, majority of them have yet to be applied in a real time environment and require domain experts to interpret the results. This gives conventional techniques a vital role as supportive tools for a wider audience, especially novice users. This paper reviews in-depth, common, phishing countermeasures including legislation, law enforcement, hands-on training, and education among others. A complete prevention layer based on the aforementioned approaches is suggested to increase awareness and report phishing to different stakeholders, including organizations, novice users, researchers, and computer security experts. Therefore, these stakeholders can understand the upsides and downsides of the current conventional approaches and the ways forward for improving them.