Internet-Based Social Engineering Psychology, Attacks, and Defenses: A Survey

Internet-based social engineering (SE) attacks are a major cyber threat. These attacks often serve as the first step in a sophisticated sequence of attacks that target, among other things, victims’ credentials and can cause financial losses. The problem has received mounting attention in recent years, with many publications proposing defenses against SE attacks. Despite this, the situation has not improved. In this article, we aim to understand and explain this phenomenon by investigating the root cause of the problem. To this end, we examine Internet-based SE attacks and defenses through a unique lens based on psychological factors (PFs) and psychological techniques (PTs). We find that there is a key discrepancy between attacks and defenses: SE attacks have deliberately exploited 46 PFs and 16 PTs in total, but existing defenses have only leveraged 16 PFs and seven PTs in total. This discrepancy may explain why existing defenses have achieved limited success and prompt us to propose a systematic roadmap for future research.