Not all phishing campaigns work, but when an attacker perseveres with a strategy that does it is the key to their success. That’s the finding of a new study focusing on the attacker, a largely ignored but crucial aspect of phishing. In addition to identifying successful strategies, it also reveals that attackers are motivated by quicker and larger rewards—with creative individuals putting more effort into constructing these malicious emails. Insights from the study, published today in open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, can be used to develop tools and training procedures to detect phishing emails.