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Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychological Manipulation Techniques and Personality Factors in Targeted Emails

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Abstract

The damage from targeted email attacks continues to be an acute issue for Internet users. Several recent studies have demonstrated that psychological manipulation techniques (e.g. Cialdini’s principles) are used effectively in phishing mails, the susceptibility to Cialdini’s principles correlates with the personality factors (so-called Big Five), and the use of AI can serve to facilitate the assessment of the personality factors based on social media information. Based on the results outlined in the aforementioned studies, this paper considers the possibility of a new type of attack that uses open source intelligence (OSINT) tools to obtain social media information about the target and then misuse personality estimation tools and psychological manipulation techniques to create malicious emails with a highly effective level of psychological manipulation for each specific target. In this paper, to estimate the possibility of such attack, investigation and analysis in relation to such questions as whether Cialdini’s principles work in targeted emails, and whether the effectiveness of Cialdini’s principles in targeted email correlates to personality factors was performed through conducting a user experiment.

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Correspondence to Masakatsu Nishigaki .

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Uehara, K., Nishikawa, H., Yamamoto, T., Kawauchi, K., Nishigaki, M. (2020). Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychological Manipulation Techniques and Personality Factors in Targeted Emails. In: Barolli, L., Hellinckx, P., Enokido, T. (eds) Advances on Broad-Band Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications. BWCCA 2019. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33506-9_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33506-9_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33505-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33506-9

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