Usability evaluation of anti-phishing toolbars

Phishing is considered as one of the most serious threats for the Internet and e-commerce. Phishing attacks abuse trust with the help of deceptive e-mails, fraudulent web sites and malware. In order to prevent phishing attacks some organizations have implemented Internet browser toolbars for identifying deceptive activities. However, the levels of usability and user interfaces are varying. Some of the toolbars have obvious usability problems, which can affect the performance of these toolbars ultimately. For the sake of future improvement, usability evaluation is indispensable. We will discuss usability of five typical anti-phishing toolbars: built-in phishing prevention in the Internet Explorer 7.0, Google toolbar, Netcraft Anti-phishing toolbar and SpoofGuard. In addition, we included Internet Explorer plug-in we have developed, Anti-phishing IEPlug. Our hypothesis was that usability of anti-phishing toolbars, and as a consequence also security of the toolbars, could be improved. Indeed, according to the heuristic usability evaluation, a number of usability issues were found. In this article, we will describe the anti-phishing toolbars, we will discuss anti-phishing toolbar usability evaluation approach and we will present our findings. Finally, we will propose advices for improving usability of anti-phishing toolbars, including three key components of anti-phishing client side applications (main user interface, critical warnings and the help system). For example, we found that in the main user interface it is important to keep the user informed and organize settings accordingly to a proper usability design. In addition, all the critical warnings an anti-phishing toolbar shows should be well designed. Furthermore, we found that the help system should be built to assist users to learn about phishing prevention as well as how to identify fraud attempts by themselves. One result of our research is also a classification of anti-phishing toolbar applications. Linfeng Li is a student at the University of Tampere, Finland. Marko Helenius is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland.