THE ROLE OF TRUST AND OPTIMISTIC BIAS IN PUBLIC WI-FI SOCIAL ENGINEERING

Abstract

What is social engineering? What is a malicious hotspot? What does being a victim of a social engineering attack mean? Perhaps most importantly, what about the human mind helps make social engineering so successful? These are the main questions I address in this paper. I begin by defining social engineering and providing an overview of its nature and why it is a problem, discussing studies and papers written on the topic. I argue that there are two underlying vulnerabilities that allow so many people to be the targets of social engineering attacks: trust and the optimistic bias. Drawing from theories about online trust and interpersonal trust, I analyze how four components of trust affect how and why people connect to public Wi-Fi connections. I also consider the role of the optimistic bias in why users continue to access sensitive information on public hotspots. To get a better understanding of these theories in action, participants have been surveyed on their knowledge of risks associated with connecting to unknown Wi-Fi and their usual behaviors on their devices.