CyberPsycho Attacks: Techniques, Causes, Effects and Recommendations to End-Users

From recent years, online social network services are mostly used for marketing, social, political, religious campaign more than just connecting to the friends. Now-a-days, government of most of the countries actively participate on network enabled platforms. Many researchers worldwide are working on social network analysis to extract information from social network services to increase productivity, awareness, learning as well as finding malicious links, phishing, spams & trending viral contents. The study in this paper focuses on causes and effects of persuasive messages based on current trending news and events which effectively may influence an individual’s behavior. We name this effect as Cyberspace plus Psychology effect leading to CyberPsycho attacks. In CyberPsycho attacks an attacker uses cyber space & social network to affect or change attitude or behavior, and achieve certain goals to attain political, religious, economical, social gains. It motivates social media users towards a certain objective by spreading the persuasive messages in the form of texts, images or videos. The study is unique, valuable and compels the experts in academia, researchers, technologists and end-users to understand & acknowledge the serious impact of psychological, social and cultural aspects of internet addiction. In this paper, we propose three fundamental models to address and analyze the above concerns. These three proposed models to identify occurrence of cyberpsycho attacks is the major contribution of this paper.