Detecting phishing websites: On the effectiveness of users' tips

Phishing attacks have become a serious problem for users of online banking and e-commerce websites. Many anti-Phishing approaches have been proposed to detect and prevent Phishing. One such approach is the anti-Phishing tips published by many governmental and private organizations to help users themselves to detect and prevent the attacks. This paper examines the effectiveness of the most common of the many different tips for detecting Phishing websites. A novel effectiveness criteria is proposed and used to examine each tip and to rank it based on its effectiveness score, thus revealing the most effective tips to enable users to detect Phishing attacks. Thus, proponents of anti-Phishing tips can focus on those tips which are most helpful to users in detecting Phishing attacks.