Social Influence on the User in Social Network: Types of Communications in Assessment of the Behavioral Risks connected with the Socio-engineering Attacks

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to study the impact of possible types of relationships between users, which are represented in the social network “VKontakte”, on the probability of the spread of a social engineering attack.Methods. To achieve this goal, a survey was developed and a web page was created, which is used to collect responses from respondents. After receiving the data, the obtained results were analyzed using the tools available in Microsoft Excel. In addition, for more in-depth analysis of the results, a C program was developed, which calculates the necessary characteristics and outputs the results to an Excel document.Results. In analyzing the results of the survey, the types of relationships between users were identified, in which they are more likely to respond to the request. It was also revealed that the answers are most often found in which several or even all categories in groups of relationship types between users were assigned the same assessments of the degree of readiness to respond to a request. In addition, it is worth noting that there are often answers in which respondents identified only one of the presented communication options.Conclusion. According to the study, it was hypothesized that the assessments of the degree of readiness to respond to a request to join the community for different groups of relationships are different, but the intragroup assessments differ little. The results obtained, demonstrating the lack of differentiation of values within groups of types of relationships, are significant, but at the same time, a deeper study of the orders that can be traced in the responses of a number of respondents is required.

Keywords

• information security
• social engineering attacks
• user security analysis
• social networks
• user interaction
• information distribution in social networks