Predicting individuals’ vulnerability to social engineering in social networks

This paper goes into research on social engineering in social networks and how the individual is affected and influenced. Most people are aware of the negative impacts of hackers and the necessity of cybersecurity, but the prevalence of social engineering to exploit an individuals beliefs and behaviors is often overlooked. This article necessitates this research into social engineering as an alternative for technical approaches to cybersecurity, with more societal notions to protect the individual from being manipulated. This research found that users with more involvement on Facebook has a higher susceptibility to being victimized by social engineering. Additionally, they found that having more social media friends is associated with less vulnerability to social engineering. They ultimately concluded that a user’s trust in their social media and the users they connect with was the greatest indicator of their level of vulnerability on social networking sites. For example, if a user is aware that most of their ‘friends’ on social media are actually strangers, they will be more skeptical of posts on their feeds and be less susceptible to influence. The researchers believe this information could be used to create some kind of vulnerability threshold that could filter posts on social networking for highly vulnerable users.