Personality Traits and Resistance to Online Trust Exploitation
Primary Investigator:
Marcus Rogers
Vaishnavi Mahindra, Tatiana Ringenberg, John Springer
Abstract
Social engineering attacks, especially trust exploitation, have become a focus of attention
for cybercriminals attempting to manipulate or deceive users to take actions that further
expose their vulnerabilities. This has also become a budding field for researchers as these
interactions are based on complex social equations that are constantly taken advantage of.
Identifying the "weakest link" is a popular method of identifying how these exploits take
place, generally by observing when individuals fall for a social engineering attack. However,
valuable insights may be used to harden security by observing patterns in users resistant
or vigilant to these attacks. Primarily, this trend may be discovered in resistant users’
personality traits. This has been found to be a more accurate indicator of behavior than
self-reported intentions. Survey responses (n=120) indicate correlations between high test
scores in trust exploitation exercises and Conscientiousness in the Big 5 Personality Model
(p<0.001). No significant correlation was seen between self-reported cybersecurity habits
and actual security behavior.