Qualitative exploration of trust towards online banking for phishing attack victims / Siti Sarah Md Ilyas

The number of phishing attacks involving online banking has records an increase percentage over the years in Malaysia. Phishing attacks impact the victims in various sentiments of emotional, mental and physical. The enormous effect is the victims exposed to the psychology of victim-blaming and lose their trust in online banking. This research aimed to investigate the current online trust of phishing attack victims towards online banking and their readiness to use online banking after experiencing phishing attack. This research also intended to propose a set of precaution measures to prevent online phishing attack were proposed based on the victim's point of view in terms of human and technological aspect. Semi structured interviews were conducted with five phishing victim identified through snowball techniques. The results of descriptive qualitative analysis showed that the victims has lost their trust in online banking despite of being reliant to the service prior to the attack. Four of the victims are reluctant to use online banking after the phishing attack. Meanwhile, one victim is still loyal to online banking due to conveniences it provide. The research shows that online banking never directly harmed the victims, but the perpetrator used online banking as the platform to commit malicious attack. Low online trust towards online banking influenced the user's loyalty and interest in online banking. For future improvement, this study should extend the research in developing a reliable anti phishing application to help online banking user in detecting phishing threat. Currently, such application does not exist to assist the user in online banking environment in Malaysia.