Building Confidence not to be Phished through a Gamified Approach: Conceptualising User's Self-Efficacy in Phishing Threat Avoidance Behaviour

Abstract: Phishing attacks are prevalent and humans are central to this online identity theft attack, which aims to steal victims' sensitive and personal information such as username, password, and online banking details. There are many anti-phishing tools developed to thwart against phishing attacks. Since humans are the weakest link in phishing, it is important to educate them to detect and avoid phishing attacks. One can argue self-efficacy is one of the most important determinants of individual's motivation in phishing threat avoidance behavior, which has co-relation with knowledge. The proposed research endeavors on the user's self-efficacy in order to enhance the individual's phishing threat avoidance behavior through their motivation. Using social cognitive theory, we explored that various knowledge attributes such as observational (vicarious) knowledge, heuristic knowledge and structural knowledge contributes immensely towards the individual's self-efficacy to enhance phishing threat prevention behavior. A theoretical framework is then developed depicting the mechanism that links knowledge attributes, self-efficacy, threat avoidance motivation that leads to users' threat avoidance behavior. Finally, a gaming prototype is designed incooperating the knowledge elements identified in this research that aimed to enhance individual's self-efficacy in phishing threat avoidance behavior.