Comparing Machine and Human Ability to Detect Phishing Emails

This paper compares the results of computer and human efforts to determine whether an email is legitimate or a phishing attempt. For this purpose, we have run two series of experiments, one for the computer and the other for human subjects. Both experiments addressed the same corpora, one of phishing emails, and the other of legitimate ones. Both the computer and human subjects were asked to detect which emails were phishing and which were legitimate. The results are interesting, both separately and in comparison. Even at this limited, non-semantic state of computation, they indicate that human and computer competences should complement each other, and that, of course, will lead to the integration of human-accessible semantics into computation.