Human and Cognitive Factors involved in Phishing Detection. A Literature Review

Human and cognitive factors considerably influence social engineering attacks. Cybercriminals take advantage of the innocence, carelessness, stress, lack of knowledge, and other aspects that make human beings vulnerable. Also, there exists difficulty for users to identify an email with phishing. However, the causes and solutions are not only technological; they also depend on human perception. Within this context, in this paper, we perform a systematic literature review using the PRISMA guidelines of the recent studies applying security and cognitive psychology, aiming to identify the human and cognitive factors that are part of a Phishing attack. The main findings of this research are focused on developing future research in cybersecurity, which we believe should go in hand with human cognitive and psychological factors.