Security tools could help developers find critical vulnerabilities, yet such tools remain underused. We surveyed developers from 14 companies and 5 mailing lists about their reasons for using and not using security tools. The resulting thirty-nine predictors of security tool use provide both expected and unexpected insights. As we expected, developers who perceive security to be important are more likely to use security tools than those who do not. But that was not the strongest predictor of security tool use, it was instead developers' ability to observe their peers using security tools.

Phishing is an act of technology-based deception that targets individuals to obtain information. To minimize the number of phishing attacks, factors that influence the ability to identify phishing attempts must be examined. The present study aimed to determine how individual differences relate to performance on a phishing task. Undergraduate students completed a questionnaire designed to assess impulsivity, trust, personality characteristics, and Internet/security habits. Participants performed an email task where they had to discriminate between legitimate emails and phishing attempts. Researchers assessed performance in terms of correctly identifying all email types (overall accuracy) as well as accuracy in identifying phishing emails (phishing accuracy). Results indicated that overall and phishing accuracy each possessed unique trust, personality, and impulsivity predictors, but shared one significant behavioral predictor. These results present distinct predictors of phishing susceptibility that should be incorporated in the development of anti-phishing technology and training.

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Eight hundred eighty-seven phishing emails from Arizona State University, Brown University, and Cornell University were assessed by two reviewers for Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion: authority, social proof, liking/similarity, commitment/consistency, scarcity, and reciprocation. A correlational analysis of email characteristics by year revealed that the persuasion principles of commitment/consistency and scarcity have increased over time, while the principles of reciprocation and social proof have decreased over time. Authority and liking/similarity revealed mixed results with certain characteristics increasing and others decreasing. Results from this study can inform user training of phishing emails and help cybersecurity software to become more effective.

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