The purpose of this project is to examine the current state of phishing attack trends, detection mechanisms, and victim profiles. In the modern era, all industries encounter an increasing number of phishing attacks year by year. The results of our research will be useful to the cyber security field and other industries alike because we will shed light on how attackers bypass the current security systems and what industry professionals can do to mitigate risk.
Our primary research questions will be: what tactics are used in modern phishing attacks, who is most commonly targeted and most susceptible, and how can we mitigate phishing-related risks? From the current state of our research, we anticipate that our results will show a steady increase in phishing attack volume, sophistication, and defense bypass rates. We also anticipate that individualized trainings will prove to be an effective prevention technique.
The preliminary research for this project has involved gathering information from existing literature to collectively analyze the knowledge already available. So far, we have made note of the new trends used by modern attackers, particularly within the context of generative AI. We are also currently looking into different factors that may make victims more or less susceptible to phishing attacks, such as individual traits and training. Our next step will be to analyze an existing dataset of phishing text-messages, where we will conduct our own data analysis to gain an up-to-date understanding of modern attacker patterns and tactics.