Cognition in Social Engineering Empirical Research: A Systematic Literature Review

• DOI: 10.1145/3635149
• Publication Date: 2023-11-30T11:48:43Z
• Authors: Pavlo Burda; Luca Allodi; Nicola Zannone
• Keywords: Empirical Research

The interdisciplinarity of the Social Engineering (SE) domain creates crucial challenges for development and advancement empirical SE research, making it particularly difficult to identify space open research questions that can be addressed empirically. This encompasses on attack conditions, employed experimental methods, interactions with underlying cognitive aspects. As a consequence, much potential in breadth existing its mapping actual processes aims measure is left untapped. In this work, we carry out systematic review 169 articles investigating overall 735 hypotheses field focusing characteristics core features from both attacker target perspectives. Our study reveals experiments only partially reproduce real attacks exploitable surface appears larger than coverage provided by current body research. Factors such as targets’ context are often ignored or not explicitly considered designs. Similarly, effects different pretexts varied targetization levels marginally investigated. findings dynamics provide insights into methodological shortcomings help supplementary techniques promising future directions.