Aspectual Human Performance Variability in Social Engineering Attacks
Abstract:
Most of the influence and persuasion techniques used in social engineering have been documented across many domains, including cybersecurity, and have been shown to rely on similar effect mechanisms used in areas such as marketing, scams, and street cons. This paper shows that, while these attacks are explained in terms of the social and psychological effect mechanisms, the aspectual lens provides a more nuanced understanding of human performance variability implicated in social engineering. The aspectual lens provides a comprehensive analytical and ontological framing, and hints at aspectually informed measures for mitigating social engineering attacks and dampening the said human performance variability.
AUTHORS
STEM Unit University of South Australia
Adelaide, Australia
Mamello Thinyane is the Optus Chair of Cybersecurity and Data Science and Associate Professor in UniSA STEM at the University of South Australia. He is a former Senior Research Advisor at the United Nations University and a visiting researcher at the Australian Centre of Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales—Australian Defence Force Academy. His research interests are on collective intelligence, societal cyber resilience, human-centric cybersecurity, and critical data studies.
Published In
Journal of Information Warfare
The definitive publication for the best and latest research and analysis on information warfare, information operations, and cyber crime. Available in traditional hard copy or online.
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