The social psychology of cybersecurity

As with many offline relationships, online interactions are often based on trust, the sharing of information and a degree of interdependence. High profile cybersecurity incidents, such as the Ashley Madison website hacking, demonstrate what happens when this trust relationship is breached. Yet despite the common media depiction, such incidents may not be the result of the archetypal hacker using technological means to get into a system. Instead, cybersecurity attacks are increasingly based primarily on social engineering techniques – the use of psychological manipulation to trick people into disclosing sensitive information or inappropriately granting access to a secure system (Tetri & Vuorinen, 2013).