NSF award for Dr. Carpenter NSF Award on Preventing Psychology
Cyber-Attacks Approximately six million Americans are targets of
identity theft each year. Many of the attacks on identity
privacy use psychological influence strategies ("psychological
attacks") to induce individuals to provide their private
information. Although people are appropriately concerned about
their privacy, they often unnecessarily disclose information
that could be used to their disadvantage. Our studies have shown
that people's privacy exposure behaviors may be severely
affected by psychological attacks. Unfortunately, research from
a psychological perspective to mitigate the attacks is scarce.
This research identifies critical aspects of warnings for a sub-
set of psychological cyber-attacks on privacy and provides
guidelines for developing effective mitigations against other
types of psychological cyber-attacks. We create computer-
mediated countermeasures. We also ascertain the extent to which
the warnings capture attention, are und