How to safely communicate with a phishing attacker by email?

Abstract

The published study is a part of the long-term research of emails with phishing attacks against the article's author. In the previous three years, 3 experiments were carried out to analyze phishing emails. The result is their detailed classification. The subsequent experiment was focused on defense against phishing attacks using the rules of the MS Outlook email client. The last experiment, which is the article's content, is devoted to analyzing communications with phishing attackers. A fake identity was created for the experiment and security rules were set up. A total of 100 phishing emails were answered, with a preference for those whose content was not aimed at fulfilling any request; that was clarified during the communications. The conducted literature search confirmed the assumption that no one is engaged in similar research, so the results of the research may be more interesting for the cybersecurity community. The articles of the literary research are focused on the issue of social engineering from an interdisciplinary perspective. A great deal of attention has also been oriented on the influence of social networks on people information perception or on their exploitation in cyber-attacks. The result of the study is a statistical analysis of communications and a detailed analysis of its content. Out of 100 replies to the phishing email, 32 (32%) were answered by the phisher. The longest communications had 6 cycles. If the phisher insisted aggressively on personal information, the communications was terminated. From the content of the communications, the attacker's procedures and his argumentation to obtain the required information were primarily examined. A detailed analysis of the texts from the communications aimed to answer the question of whether the phisher is a robot or a person. Further considerations are being made within the team on how to continue researching phishing attacks.