{"id":59132,"date":"2025-08-05T17:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T17:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/study-finds-humans-not-completely-useless-at-malware-detection\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T17:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T17:00:07","slug":"study-finds-humans-not-completely-useless-at-malware-detection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/study-finds-humans-not-completely-useless-at-malware-detection\/","title":{"rendered":"Study finds humans not completely useless at malware detection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers from the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo have discovered exactly how users decide whether an application is legitimate or malware before installing it \u2013 and the good news is they’re better than you might expect, at least when primed to expect malware.<\/p>\n

“Most existing malware research analyzes ‘after action’ reports,” co-author and Waterloo professor of science Daniel Vogel explained in the paper’s announcement. “That is, investigations into what went wrong after a successful attack. Our study, which featured novice, intermediate and expert users, is the first malware research to observe user strategies in real time.”<\/p>\n

The study had a relatively limited participant pool of 36 users drawn from jobs including customer service reps, administrative assistants, a social worker, a nurse, an entomologist, plus “intermediate” and “advanced” users working in IT management, software development, and threat analysis. Participants were placed in front of a Windows 10 laptop with a mocked-up Microsoft Teams interface. Their task was to decide whether or not the software a “colleague” had just sent them was legitimate or malware.<\/p>\n