Social engineering is the art of getting users to compromise
information systems. Instead of technical attacks on systems,
social engineers target humans with access to information,
manipulating them into divulging confidential information or
even into carrying out their malicious attacks through influ-
ence and persuasion. Technical protection measures are
usually ineffective against this kind of attack. In addition to
that, people generally believe that they are good at detecting
such attacks. Research, however, indicates that people
perform poorly on detecting lies and deception (
Qin and
Burgoon, 2007; Marett et al., 2004
). The infamous attacks of
Kevin Mitnick (
Mitnick and Simon, 2002
) showed how devas-
tating sophisticated social engineering attacks are for the in-
formation security of both companies and governmental
organizations. When social engineering is discussed in the
information and computer security field, it is usually by way of
examples and stories (such as Mitnick
'
s). However, at a more
fundamental level, important findings have been made in
social psychology on the principles of persuasion. Particularly
the work of
Cialdini (2001)
, an expert in the field of persuasion,
is frequently cited in contributions to social engineering
research. Although Cialdini
'
s examples focus on persuasion in
marketing, the fundamental principles are crucial for anyone
seeking to understand how deception works.