Phishing Awareness and Elderly Users in Social Media

Nowadays, banking, mobile phone communications, transportation, and other daily services are closely intertwined with the Internet. However, although online services make our lives more convenient and manageable, criminals have found ways of accessing users via the Internet to steal sensitive information such as passwords and bank details. This can cost Internet users dearly. Elderly users are the main target for online criminals, due to their relative lack of knowledge about the Internet and its risks. Therefore, they often become victims of various types of cybercrime. This paper studies the effects of security awareness on elderly users and their ability to detect phishing attacks in social media. With this approach, a real experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of security awareness on WhatsApp application users in their daily communications. The results of the experiment revealed that phishing awareness training has a significant positive effect on the ability of elderly users to identify phishing messages, thereby avoiding attacks.