Phishing emails are a continuing threat in today's society—this study aimed to unpeel the layers on why certain people are prone to phishing emails than others. Participants were presented with twenty legitimate emails as well as twenty phishing emails in random order and were asked to be phishing or not. They were also asked to explain why they chose the answer they believed was right in a couple of sentences. Data was compiled and collected via a Qualtrics survey and analyzed using JASP. Results obtained indicated little to no correlation between the number of features mentioned in the study and classifying and email accuracy as phishing. Studies like this help understand the cognitive constructs that lead to people unknowingly falling in traps set out by phishers and what prompts susceptible victims to think such emails are legitimate rather than seeing the dangers behind them.

Θεωρητική και πειραματική μελέτη μεθόδων ταξινόμησης μηνυμάτων ηλεκτρονικού ταχυδρομείου σε Spam και Legitimate με σκοπό την βελτιστοποίηση της ακρίβειας ταξινόμησης και την επιλογή των κατάλληλων παραμέτρων για σχεδιασμό ενός φίλτρου με ικανοποιητική απόδοση στην φραγή κακόβουλων μηνυμάτων / Theoretical and experimental study of methods blocking Spam E-mails with the purpose of improving the parameters of a spam blocking filter.

In information systems design there are two schools of thought about what factors are necessary to create a successful information system. The first, conventional view holds that system performance is a key, so that efficiency characteristics such as system usability and task completion time are primary concerns of system designers. The second, emerging view holds that the visual design is also the key, so that visual interface characteristics such as visual appeal, in addition to efficiency characteristics, are critical concerns of designers. This view contends that visual design enhances system use. Thus, this work examines the effects of visual design on computer systems. Visual design exerts its influence on systems through two mechanisms: it evokes affective responses from IT users, such as arousal and pleasure and it influences individuals’ cognitive assessments of systems. Given that both affective and cognitive reactions are significant antecedents of user behaviors in the IT realm, it is no surprise that visual design plays a critical role in information system success. Human-computer-interaction literature indicates that visual aesthetics positively influences such information success factors as usability, online trust, user satisfaction, flow experience, and so on. Although academic research has introduced visual design into the Information Systems (IS) field and validated its effects, visual design is still very limited in three contexts: product aesthetics in e-commerce, mobile applications and commercial emails. This dissertation presents three studies to help fill these theoretical gaps respectively.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in insider threats within organisations and these have caused massive losses and damages. Due to the fact that email communications are a crucial part of the modern-day working environment, many insider threats exist within organisations’ email infrastructure. It is a well-known fact that employees not only dispatch ‘business-as-usual’ emails, but also emails that are completely unrelated to company business, perhaps even involving malicious activity and unethical behaviour. Such insider threat activities are mostly caused by employees who have legitimate access to their organisation’s resources, servers, and non-public data. However, these same employees abuse their privileges for personal gain or even to inflict malicious damage on the employer. The problem is that the high volume and velocity of email communication make it virtually impossible to minimise the risk of insider threat activities, by using techniques such as filtering and rule-based systems. The research presented in this dissertation suggests strategies to minimise the risk of insider threat via email systems by employing a machine-learning-based approach. This is done by studying and creating categories of malicious behaviours posed by insiders, and mapping these to phrases that would appear in email communications. Furthermore, a large email dataset is classified according to behavioural characteristics of employees. Machine learning algorithms are employed to identify commonly occurring insider threats and to group the occurrences according to insider threat classifications. / Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Computer Science / MSc (Computer Science) / Unrestricted

This study investigated the extent to which occupational therapists (OT) use the Internet as a clinical resource and as a tool for communication with clients. It also identified barriers and facilitators associated with Internet use. A survey was mailed to all occupational therapists registered with the College of Occupational Therapists of Ontario. Our findings based on 1382 respondents show that a large percentage of occupational therapists currently use the Internet for clinical purposes. A majority of respondents reported using the Internet to meet their practice needs, primarily for looking up relevant clinical information, and less commonly as a communication tool with their clients. Greater Internet use was associated with younger age and fewer years of practice. Having a computer station, a work culture fostering Internet use, accessible technical support, paid time and credible ratings of websites were five most influential factors on Internet use in OTs’ clinical practice.

This study investigated the extent to which occupational therapists (OT) use the Internet as a clinical resource and as a tool for communication with clients. It also identified barriers and facilitators associated with Internet use. A survey was mailed to all occupational therapists registered with the College of Occupational Therapists of Ontario. Our findings based on 1382 respondents show that a large percentage of occupational therapists currently use the Internet for clinical purposes. A majority of respondents reported using the Internet to meet their practice needs, primarily for looking up relevant clinical information, and less commonly as a communication tool with their clients. Greater Internet use was associated with younger age and fewer years of practice. Having a computer station, a work culture fostering Internet use, accessible technical support, paid time and credible ratings of websites were five most influential factors on Internet use in OTs’ clinical practice.

This study focuses on the pragmatic transfers that emerge in the English emails produced byChinese L2 English speakers. Despite doubts about taking Chinese English as a new variety, the study believes there are some common and unique pragmatic features existing in the English text produced by Chinese L2 English speakers. 104 emails written by 13 subjects with different English proficiency and different English exposure were collected. Questionnaires were sent out to the same subjects, trying to find out the factors that affect their pragmatic performance. The study accomplished the following main findings: 1) There are differences in the extent to which pragmatic transfer occurs among different subjects. 2) The individual subject’s pragmatic performance in English is not necessarily decided by the subjects’ English proficiency. 3) The extent of pragmatic transfer in the individual subject’s case seems to be much more complex situation than depending on any single factor of the following: English proficiency, exposure to English, or confidence in using English. 4) Some email writers have different extent of pragmatic transfer in the situations with different levels of tension. 5) However, whether the subjects have different extent of pragmatic transfer or not seems again to be too complex a situation to decide which of the factors (English proficiency, exposure to English, or confidence in using English) plays a decisive role.

Aim:  Optimize the usage of transactional emails, going beyond their communicative nature and combining it with marketing purposes. The project has been developed in collaboration with Incomedia, Italian software developer and vendor. Objective: Understand how Incomedia can exploit the benefits of transactional emails in a marketing perspective in order to increase the sales of its software. Limitation: The specificity of the topic, strictly related to Incomedia’s activities, products and consumers. Limits of time and variables tested with the A/B experiment. Theory/Methodology : It helped us to leverage the potential of transactional emails through the improvement of one particular element, the price discount offers. Due to the particularity of the software “medium-price” level, we have choose to do an A/B test experiment of the new transactional email by presenting the discount in two different ways: monetary and percentage terms. Result: The new transactional email, with the price discount, drove us to satisfactory results. The price discount expressed in percentage was better perceived and accepted by consumers; thanks to this, Incomedia during the experiment could highly increase its sales.

Electronic communication is becoming an integral part of the communication structure within organisations, but the costs and benefits are not being assessed. Communication by email is usually assumed to be an efficient and effective means of sending messages. However, on analysis the process is seen to be much more complex and much less efficient than is normally assumed. Communication is carried out in many different forms, but the common underlying motive of communication is to improve working practices and to increase productivity. As communication pervades nearly everything we do, even small improvements in the effectiveness and cost of our communication processes can have significant benefits. The aim of this research was to analyse the cost effectiveness of using email and to suggest ways in which the cost effectiveness can be improved. A number of studies have been conducted into the cost effectiveness of email within organisations. The studies were carried out mainly at the Danwood Group, the company sponsoring the author's PhD research. The Danwood Group has just over 500 employees at 19 sites around the UK and its head office is based in Lincoln, where all of the email case studies in this thesis where undertaken. The Danwood Group retails office equipment, predominately photocopiers. Email behaviour was monitored by the use of software at the Danwood Group. This raised a number of questions on the ethical issues of electronic monitoring. This thesis explores these issues and proposes a set of guidelines to allow electronic monitoring within strict professional and ethical guidelines. The Danwood Group studies examined how and when email was used. It was found that, when the company first started using email, over two thirds of messages were non-business-related, though this dropped to less than half in a few months. It was also found that many messages could be delivered in one line of text. A one-line message service was introduced and this was found to save employee time for both senders and receivers of the messages. A costing formula was developed measuring the human cost of operating email messaging. The final study was to determine how long it took employees to recover and return to normal work after an email interruption and this was compared with published data for telephone interrupts. From these results a set of guidelines were developed to enable companies to make the most efficient use of email. The thesis concludes by identifying further areas of research into email usage that would help give a better understanding of methods to enable email to become even more cost effective.

Ransomware has been a growing threat to today's organizations, with irreparable damages and billions of dollars lost, it is crucial for organizations to implement mitigation strategies that can counter these attacks. With phishing attempts being the primary attack vector, it is evident that organizations need to implement the best practices in order to avoid the consequences. Thus, this study addresses the question “How do the actual ransomware mitigation strategies implemented by Swedish organizations compare to the best practices suggested in literature, with a focus on phishing emails as a common means of ransomware transmission?” The study was conducted by utilizing semi-structured interviews and interviewing five participants that work or have worked as IT-security consultants which are then summarized and analyzed with a thematic analysis approach. Seven relevant themes and fifteen sub-themes were introduced and analyzed in order to answer the proposed research question: attack vector, security awareness training, technical solutions, challenges of solutions, frameworks, evolution and keeping yourself updated. All participants were contacted via Linkedin and the interviews were done virtually via Zoom. The findings of this study shows that Swedish organizations utilize a minimal amount of ransomware mitigation strategies due to the lack of resources, care and overall awareness regarding the topic. According to the interviewed participants, basic forms of technical solutions and administrative solutions are mostly implemented, however they are a lacking form of medium and can generally be bypassed easily. The primary factors that were brought up and introduced was security awareness training and technical solutions. Essentially, it all boils down to employee’s incompetence and lack of security awareness. No matter how many technical solutions that are implemented within an organization, if an employee is not aware that they shouldn’t click on malicious links, an infection might spread.