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Human Cognition Through the Lens of Social Engineering Cyberattacks

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Montañez, Rosana, Golob, Edward, Xu, Shouhuai·2020·Frontiers in Psychology

DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01755PMC PMC7554349

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Abstract

Social engineering cyberattacks are a major threat because they often prelude sophisticated and devastating cyberattacks. Social engineering cyberattacks are a kind of psychological attack that exploits weaknesses in human cognitive functions. Adequate defense against social engineering cyberattacks requires a deeper understanding of what aspects of human cognition are exploited by these cyberattacks, why humans are susceptible to these cyberattacks, and how we can minimize or at least mitigate their damage. These questions have received some amount of attention but the state-of-the-art understanding is superficial and scattered in the literature. In this paper, we review human cognition through the lens of social engineering cyberattacks. Then, we propose an extended framework of human cognitive functions to accommodate social engineering cyberattacks. We cast existing studies on various aspects of social engineering cyberattacks into the extended framework, while drawing a number of insights that represent the current understanding and shed light on future research directions. The extended framework might inspire future research endeavor towards a new sub-field that can be called {\em Cybersecurity Cognitive Psychology}, which tailors or adapts principles of Cognitive Psychology to the cybersecurity domain while embracing new notions and concepts that are unique to the cybersecurity domain.

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Authors: Montañez, R., Golob, E., & Xu, S.
Affiliations: The University of Texas at San Antonio (US)
Corresponding author: Xu, Shouhuai
ORCID: Golob, Edward
Xu, Shouhuai
Venue: Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Published: 2020-09-30
Volume: 11
Pages: 1755-1755
ISSN: 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01755
PMC: PMC7554349
OpenAlex: W3091679231
Cited by: 106
References: 119
Citations by year: 2026: 21 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 2
FWCI: 1.31
Type: journal article
Language: en
Open access: gold
doi.org
Licence: cc-by
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)
Locations: Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
PubMed (publishedVersion)
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders: National Science Foundation (1736209, 1814825)
Army Research Office (W911NF-17, W911NF-17-1-0566, W911NF)
Topics: Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information and Cyber Security
Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › User Authentication and Security Systems
Keywords: human cognition, cognitive psychology, cybersecurity, human factors in cybersecurity

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Human Cognition Through the Lens of Social Engineering Cyberattacks

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