Contemplating social engineering studies and attack scenarios: A review study

The previous year has seen an enormous increase in the studies related to social engineering. This increase is partly due to increasing number of social engineering attacks and partly due to people's inability to identify the attack. Thus, it is of great importance to find solutions which are helpful for human to understand the social engineering attacks and scenarios. To address this, we have performed a literature review of studies (on social engineering) in top‐notch journals and conferences. In this paper, we have enlisted the types of attacks, and the persuasion techniques used by social engineers as listed in the literature. We also combined different theories which researchers tried to use to explain various activities of social engineers. Furthermore, we have mentioned that a better understanding of the social engineering attack scenarios can be done using thematic and game‐based analysis techniques. Preliminary empirical evaluation of the proposed game based method shows overall neutral results. Future extension and evaluation is needed for the proposed methods.