Psychological Vulnerabilities to Deception, for Use in Computer Security

Vulnerability to deception is part of human nature, owing to fundamental limitations of the human mind. This vulnerability is exploited by con artists and scammers, but also by the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities for the purposes of operational security, intelligence collection on adversaries, and underco ver operations against organized crime. More recently, deception is being applied to computer se curity, for example, through the use of honeypots. This paper describes psychological vuln erabilities to deception and how they can be exploited to outwit computer hackers. The paper dra ws upon research in psychology and fraud, and the military and intelligence deception-literat ure.