Research

Abstract This paper investigates how traditional phishing training centred around spotting patterns and components of a phishing email may be antiquated in the modern threat landscape. It looks at how users who have had this training can still fall victim to phishing attacks as modern complex phishing attacks focus on emotive response and emotional exploitation. With one example of such tactics being “Amygdala Hijacking” (Chemudupati and Valecha, 2024) where an attacker may use consequence tactics or plausible reasoning to force a user into an emotive state to perform actions like responding to the email or downloading or inputting personal information when ordinarily without the use of these tactics they would not. This paper does not explore in depth into psychological, neurological or biological causation it discusses “Amygdala Hijacking” (Chemudupati and Valecha, 2024) as a concept in the context of phishing. This paper also advises training considerations that could assist in the mitigation of this threat. Publication Information DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20364058Publish Date: 25th May 2026Version: 1.0 Download