08/19/2019

Psychological Tricks of the Malware Trade

The State of Security

As a Professional Services Consultant, I have the pleasure of traveling all around the globe meeting clients and talking to a wide variety of IT security professionals who form the front line of defence against malware.

One of my favorite topics is how people got their start in their careers in IT, but when I start discussing my own early years and touch upon my university studies, I’m often surprised by the number of people who do a double take when I share my chosen subject.

Applied Psychology and Computing may seem like an unusual combination of topics to many until I explain just how much the two topics can take from each other. Whether we are using psychology to inform the design of an artificial intelligence’s strategies for learning or using psychical techniques to better understand how human-computer interactions can be enhanced, there’s a lot of practical benefits to applying one field of science’s findings to the other.

Unfortunately, this is a trick not lost on malware designers, who are increasingly exploiting clever traps that leverage the psychology of end users and system administrators alike. Manipulation is an ancient art, but psychological studies are constantly revealing new facets to the science of “nudging” people into particular behaviors, and malware is more than happy to deploy these techniques.

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