Leveraging empathy

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings and emotions of others. In this case, an attacker will put themself in a difficult situation in the hope that the victim will feel empathy and then be more vulnerable to fall into a trap to give information, perform a questionable action, or even bypass a security process to help the attacker during the difficult situation.

Figure 1.16 – Using empathy to bypass some security controls

The preceding figure shows a great example of how an attacker can leverage empathy to bypass a security control.

Notice that to enhance the chances of success, the attacker will search for a victim that is more likely to feel empathy for a given situation. For example, in this case, the attacker targeted a victim that is a mom and, therefore, is more likely to feel empathy for a situation in which a supposedly pregnant girl is suffering, and thus the victim would be willing to bypass a security process to help the pregnant girl.