Factors affecting user's judgment of cyberattacks

The number of social engineering attacks has risen dramatically in the past few years, causing unpleasant damage both to organizations and to individuals. Yet, little research has discussed social engineering in the virtual environments of social networks (SN). Moreover, there were no agreement regarding the user's characteristics that may make the user more vulnerable to social engineering in social networks. Therefore, the present study proposes a user-centric framework to identify the factors that most impair users judgment of cyberattacks based on four perspectives: Socio-psychological, Habitual, Socio-emotional, and Perceptual as previous research has mainly focused on Socio-psychological perspective while other important perspectives remain relatively unexplored. A mixed method approach has been adopted to validate the framework factors and components.