Phishing has been, and remains to be, one of the most common types of social engineering. It is the act of tricking users to perform actions they normally wouldn’t using e-mail. Since phishing involves using technical measures to trick users, it is a social technical phenomenon that must be understood from the technical as well as the social side. While phishing and phishing susceptibility has been researched for decades, the effect of language ability on phishing susceptibility is underresearched. In this paper, we conducted a survey where we had swedes rate their English ability before classifying e-mails in Swedish and English as fraudulent or legitimate. The results shows that the respondents English ability does affect the ability to correctly identify legitimate emails and brings another piece to the puzzle of phishing susceptibility.
CC BY 4.0