Estimating human resilience to social engineering attacks through computer configuration data : A literature study on the state of social engineering vulnerabilities

Sammanfattning: Social engineering as a method of attack is increasingly becoming a problem for both corporations and individuals. From identity theft to enormous financial losses, this form of attack is notorious for affecting complex structures, yet often being very simple in its form. Whereas for other forms of cyber- attack, tools like antivirus and antimalware are now industry standard, have proven to be reliable ways to keep safe private and confidential data, there is no such equivalent for social engineering attacks. There is not, as of this day, a trustworthy and precise way of estimating resilience to these attacks, while still keeping the private data private. The purpose of this report is to compile the different aspects of a users computer data that have been proven to significantly indicative of their susceptibility to these kinds of attacks, and with them, devise a system that can, with some degree of precision, estimate the resilience to social engineering of the user. This report is a literature study on the topic of social engineering and how it relates to computer program data, configuration and personality. The different phases of research each led to a more comprehensive way of linking the different pieces of data together and devising a rudimentary way of estimating human resilience to social engineering through the observation of a few configuration aspects. For the purposes of this report, the data had to be reasonably accessible, respecting privacy, and being something that can be easily extrapolated from one user to another. Based on findings, ranging from psychological data and behavioral patterns, to network configurations, we conclude that, even though there is data that supports the possibility of estimating resilience, there is, as of this day, no empirically proven way of doing so in a precise manner. An estimation model is provided by the end of the report, but the limitations of this project did not allow for an experiment to prove its validity beyond the theories it is based upon.