Grooming: analyzing the behavior of online attackers from the perspective of social engineering.

Abstract

In the field of information security, there are several areas of study that are under development. Social engineering

is one of them since it addresses the multidisciplinary challenges of cybersecurity. Today, the attacks associated

with social engineering are diverse and have been the subject of numerous research; however, cyberattacks like grooming have been excluded from these studies. In the last decade, various efforts have been made to understand the structure and approach of grooming from the field of computer science with the use of computational learning algorithms. However, these studies are not aligned with information security and their proposals are still limited. Nowadays, the psychological techniques used to harass, intimidate, threaten, steal information are more common due to the free access to technological resources and the digitalization of communications. The specific research problem lies in the lack of a formal and methodological process that allows studying attacks related to online harassment and relating them to information security concepts. This scientific research presents how a cyberattack related to online harassment can be analyzed and linked to information security concepts through a scientific research method and the approach of a procedural process for this purpose. The procedural process made it possible to analyze data and detect the communicational intentions of the attackers with high precision. Additionally, a functional parental control prototype is presented that supports the proposed modeling process.