Phishing and social engineering in Cybersecurity - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Phishing and Social Engineering

📖 Scenario: You work in a cybersecurity awareness team. Your task is to create a simple program that helps identify phishing attempts and social engineering tactics by analyzing email messages.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program that stores example email messages, sets a suspicious keyword list, checks each email for these keywords, and flags suspicious emails.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called emails with three example emails as keys and their content as values.

Create a list called suspicious_keywords containing words often used in phishing or social engineering.

Write a loop that checks each email content for any suspicious keyword and stores the result in a dictionary called flags.

Add a final step to count how many emails were flagged as suspicious.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

This project simulates how cybersecurity teams detect phishing and social engineering attempts by scanning email content for suspicious signs.

💼 Career

Understanding phishing detection is essential for cybersecurity analysts, IT support, and anyone responsible for protecting users from online scams.

1

Create the emails dictionary

Create a dictionary called emails with these exact entries: 'email1' with value 'Your account has been suspended. Click here to verify.', 'email2' with value 'Meeting agenda for tomorrow attached.', and 'email3' with value 'Urgent: Update your password immediately.'.

Cybersecurity

# Create the emails dictionary with the given entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with keys 'email1', 'email2', and 'email3' and assign the exact string values.

2

Set suspicious keywords list

Create a list called suspicious_keywords containing these exact words: 'suspended', 'urgent', 'verify', and 'password'.

Cybersecurity

emails = {
    'email1': 'Your account has been suspended. Click here to verify.',
    'email2': 'Meeting agenda for tomorrow attached.',
    'email3': 'Urgent: Update your password immediately.'
}
# Create the suspicious_keywords list with the given words
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python list with the exact words as strings.

3

Flag suspicious emails

Create an empty dictionary called flags. Then use a for loop with variables email_id and content to iterate over emails.items(). Inside the loop, set flags[email_id] to true if any word from suspicious_keywords is found in content (case insensitive), otherwise false.

Cybersecurity

emails = {
    'email1': 'Your account has been suspended. Click here to verify.',
    'email2': 'Meeting agenda for tomorrow attached.',
    'email3': 'Urgent: Update your password immediately.'
}
suspicious_keywords = ['suspended', 'urgent', 'verify', 'password']
# Create flags dictionary and check each email content for suspicious keywords
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary to store flags. Convert content to lowercase to check keywords case-insensitively. Use any() with a generator expression.

4

Count flagged emails

Create a variable called count_flagged and set it to the number of emails in flags that have the value true.

Cybersecurity

emails = {
    'email1': 'Your account has been suspended. Click here to verify.',
    'email2': 'Meeting agenda for tomorrow attached.',
    'email3': 'Urgent: Update your password immediately.'
}
suspicious_keywords = ['suspended', 'urgent', 'verify', 'password']
flags = {}
for email_id, content in emails.items():
    content_lower = content.lower()
    flags[email_id] = any(keyword in content_lower for keyword in suspicious_keywords)
# Count how many emails are flagged as true
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sum() with a generator expression to count true values in flags.