CAPEC-416: Manipulate Human Behavior

MITRE classification

Overview

CAPEC-416 (Manipulate Human Behavior) is a meta-level attack pattern catalogued by MITRE in the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC). It describes a recurring method attackers use to exploit software weaknesses.

What the attacker needs

Prerequisites

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

Consequences

What a successful CAPEC-416 attack can achieve.

Other

Affects: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability

Attack patterns that manipulate human behavior can result in a wide variety of consequences and potentially affect the confidentiality, availability, and/or integrity of an application or system.

How to mitigate it

Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-416.

An organization should provide regular, robust cybersecurity training to its employees to prevent successful social engineering attacks.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about CAPEC-416.

What is CAPEC-416?

An adversary exploits inherent human psychological predisposition to influence a targeted individual or group to solicit information or manipulate the target into performing an action that serves the adversary's interests. Many interpersonal social engineering techniques do not involve outright deception, although they can; many are subtle ways of manipulating a target to remove barriers, make the target feel comfortable, and produce an exchange in which the target is either more likely to share information directly, or let key information slip out unintentionally. A skilled adversary uses these techniques when appropriate to produce the desired outcome. Manipulation techniques vary from the overt, such as pretending to be a supervisor to a help desk, to the subtle, such as making the target feel comfortable with the adversary's speech and thought patterns.

How do you prevent CAPEC-416?

An organization should provide regular, robust cybersecurity training to its employees to prevent successful social engineering attacks.

How severe is CAPEC-416?

MITRE rates CAPEC-416 as Medium severity with medium likelihood of attack.

References

Attack-pattern data is sourced from the MITRE CAPEC catalog (v3.9). Weakness associations link to the corresponding CWE entries on RadicalNotion.AI.

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