Public Notice Feb 20th 4:00 – 5:00 PM
CS/DS Candidate Research Talk – Ankit Shrestha
Title : “It is Luring You to Click on the Link With False Advertising” – Understanding Influence of Social Engineering to Co-design Contextualized Interventions
Abstract :Social engineering attacks exploit humans, the weakest link in online security. In fact, 90% of data breach incidents in the United States target the human elements through some form of social engineering. Past incidents using social engineering attacks have resulted in severe consequences. With the advent of social networking sites, clickbait, which is the most common form of social engineering used in social media, has become a serious issue for individuals, society and the government. Clickbait headlines work through superlatives and intensifiers, creating information gaps to increase the relevance of their associated links that direct users to time-wasting and sometimes even malicious websites. Moreover, clickbait could be even more effective when targeted by using the public information about users such as their affiliated institutions, interests, and even photos of their friends. For instance, an attacker could use a photo of a social media user to create clickbait posts using Artificial Intelligence tools like Deepfakes and target his/her connections. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the user’s perceptions and behavior toward clickbait and its impact while designing usable and effective countermeasures against it. The design of these countermeasures in my studies actively involves users in the design process as partners. Based on our studies, we observe that users are vulnerable to clickbait in many forms due to various reasons including relevance, peer influence, and sharing behavior. To support these users, various concepts of countermeasures including persuasion, storytelling, curiosity diffusion, and social pressure are explored revealing varying level of effectiveness. In line with these findings, in the short term, my research will focus on understanding and designing for diverse population regarding social engineering through social media. In the long term, the security and privacy aspect of emerging tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Metaverse need to be understood.
Location : HNS 167/168