Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychological Manipulation Techniques and Both Personality Factors and Behavioral Characteristics in Targeted Email

Abstract

To succeed in targeted email attacks, the attacker attempts to create a targeted email that is difficult for the target to distinguish from legitimate email. This is the reason why attackers use Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to try to gather information about targets. Besides this, recent AI technologies make the matter worse now. We consider the possibility of a new type of attack where the attacker uses AI tools to estimate the personality and behavioral characteristics of the target based on the information obtained from OSINT tools, and create malicious emails with highly effective psychological manipulation for specific targets. In this paper, to confirm the danger of that targeted email attack, the relationship between a psychological manipulation technique (Cialdini’s principles) and both individual personality and behavioral characteristics was experimentally investigated. The analysis proved that Cialdini’s principles introduced in sentences of the targeted emails show different trends based on both personality factors and behavioral characteristics of the individual.