  Phishing attacks have become an increasing threat to online users. Recent
research has begun to focus on the factors that cause people to respond to
them. Our study examines the correlation between the Big Five personality
traits and email phishing response. We also examine how these factors affect
users behavior on Facebook, including posting personal information and choosing
Facebook privacy settings.
  Our research shows that when using a prize phishing email, we find a strong
correlation between gender and the response to the phishing email. In addition,
we find that the neuroticism is the factor most correlated to responding to
this email. Our study also found that people who score high on the openness
factor tend to both post more information on Facebook as well as have less
strict privacy settings, which may cause them to be susceptible to privacy
attacks. In addition, our work detected no correlation between the participants
estimate of being vulnerable to phishing attacks and actually being phished,
which suggests susceptibility to phishing is not due to lack of awareness of
the phishing risks and that realtime response to phishing is hard to predict in
advance by online users.
  We believe that better understanding of the traits which contribute to online
vulnerability can help develop methods for increasing users privacy and
security in the future.

Human-Computer Interaction;Computers and Society