Hacking: The Next Generation

Hacking the Psyche

In addition to tangible information available on social networks, attackers can leverage the emotional feelings individuals express on social networking applications to perform social engineering attacks with the aim of influencing and manipulating the target individual.

Note

The We Feel Fine project is a good representation of how feelings from social applications can be captured and visualized. The We Feel Fine system searches social spaces online for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the sentence. Collected feelings are then displayed in various forms of visualization. Even though this project is not related to information security, it is a good example of the emerging techniques and importance of sentiment mining from social applications being discussed in this section. The project is located at http://www.wefeelfine.org/.

To illustrate how powerful sentiment analysis can be for an attacker, let’s assume a situation in which the attacker wants to perform sentiment analysis on a specific individual whom we will refer to as Jack Smith. We will then brainstorm how an attacker may use the results of the analysis to influence Jack.

Let’s assume that Jack has a Twitter account, a weblog on Blogger, and a Facebook account that he uses frequently. The first thing the attacker must do is stitch together Jack’s social presence online into one feed that she can analyze from the recent past to the present. To achieve ...