CAPEC-427: Influence via Psychological Principles

Description
The adversary shapes the target's actions or behavior by focusing on the ways human interact and learn, leveraging such elements as cognitive and social psychology. In a variety of ways, a target can be influenced to behave or perform an action through capitalizing on what scholarship and research has learned about how and why humans react to specific scenarios and cues.
Extended Description

Pretexting can also be used to impersonate people in certain jobs and roles that they never themselves have done. In simple form, these attacks can be leveraged to learn information about a target. More complicated iterations may seek to solicit a target to perform some action that assists the adversary in exploiting organizational weaknesses or obtaining access to secure facilities or systems. Pretexting is not a one-size fits all solution. Good information gathering techniques can make or break a good pretext. A solid pretext is an essential part of building trust. If an adversary’s alias, story, or identity has holes or lacks credibility or even the perception of credibility the target will most likely catch on.

Severity :

Low

Possibility :

Low

Type :

Standard
Prerequisites

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • The adversary must have the means and knowledge of how to communicate with the target in some manner.
Skills required

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • Low The adversary requires strong inter-personal and communication skills.
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Related CWE

A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.

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