Short-term memory, verbal fluency, and positive affect in middle-old age may contribute to resilience against online spear-phishing attacks. These results inform mechanisms of online fraud susceptibility and real-life decision-supportive interventions towards fraud risk reduction in aging.

Spear phishing emails are key in many cyber attacks. Successful emails employ psychological weapons of influence and relevant life domains. This paper investigates spear phishing susceptibility as a function of Internet user age (old vs young), weapon of influence, and life domain. A 21day study was conducted with 158 participants (younger and older Internet users). Data collection took place at the participants' homes to increase ecological validity. Our results show that older women were the most vulnerable group to phishing attacks. While younger adults were most susceptible to scarcity, older adults were most susceptible to reciprocation. Further, there was a discrepancy, particularly among older users, between self-reported susceptibility awareness and their behavior during the intervention. Our results show the need for demographic personalization for warnings, training and educational tools in targeting the specifics of the older adult population 1 .

Spam has been increasingly used for malware distribution. This paper analyzed modern spam from an age-comparative perspective to (i) discover the extent to which psychological weapons of influence and life domains were represented in today’s spam emails and (ii) clarify variations in the use of these weapons and life domains by user demographics. Thirty five young and 32 older participants forwarded 18,605 emails from their spam folder to our study email account. A random set of 961 emails were submitted to qualitative content coding and quantitative statistical analysis. Reciprocation was the most prevalent weapon; financial, leisure, and independence the most prevalent life domains. Older adults received health and independence-related spam emails more frequently, while young adults received leisure and occupation-related spam emails more often. These age differences show a level of targeting by user demographics in current spam campaigns. This targeting shows the need for age-tailored demographic warnings highlighting the presence of influence and pretexting (life domains) for suspicious emails for improved response to cyber-attacks that could result from spam distribution. The insights from this study and the produced labeled dataset of spam messages can inform the development of the next generation of such solutions, especially those based on machine learning.