Social media information security threats: Anthropomorphic emoji analysis on social engineering

The evolution of anthropomorphism and affective design principles in Social Medial has allowed friends and colleagues to create content across organizational settings that now provision for emotions through the popular use of emoji. Of concern to information systems security practitioners is that the use emoji can be effective in social engineering through facilitating escalated malevolent attacks to unsuspecting victims. The article applies theories from social psychology, criminology and information systems while using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to determine the possibility of using emoji as tools for effective social engineering. A university setting was used and student–actors enlisted to execute social engineering scenarios under carefully controlled environments. Screen shots of social engineering using emoji were taken by student-actors and sent to researcher for analysis. Qualitative data analysis involved prepossessing emoji data through tokenization and normalization. Results reveal two important findings. Firstly, that the effective use of emoji is more likely to persuade victims because of unsuspecting emotional appeal. Secondly, more time was taken to persuade a victim when only textual words instead of emoji were used in the interaction process. The results of findings are discussed in the main article.