CAPEC-427
Influence via Psychological Principles
The adversary shapes the target's actions or behavior by focusing on the ways human interact and learn, leveraging such elements as cognitive and social psychology. In a variety of ways, a target can be influenced to behave or perform an action through capitalizing on what scholarship and research has learned about how and why humans react to specific scenarios and cues.
Ask an AI about this attack pattern
Show the prompt
Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-427: Influence via Psychological Principles: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/427.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/427?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.
Prerequisites
The adversary must have the means and knowledge of how to communicate with the target in some manner.
Skills required
- Low skill
The adversary requires strong inter-personal and communication skills.
Consequences
| Impact | Affects | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Other | Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability | Attacks that successfully influence the target into performing an action via psychological principles can result in a variety of consequences that negatively affect the confidentiality, availability, and/or integrity of an application or system. |
Mitigations
An organization should provide regular, robust cybersecurity training to its employees to prevent social engineering attacks.
Related attack patterns
- Part of
- CAPEC-416 Manipulate Human Behavior
MITRE's words, unchanged: CAPEC-427 at MITRE. CAPEC is Copyright © 2007–2026, The MITRE Corporation, used under the CAPEC terms of use: “The MITRE Corporation (MITRE) hereby grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC™) for research, development, and commercial purposes. Any copy you make for such purposes is authorized provided that you reproduce MITRE’s copyright designation and this license in any such copy.” CAPEC and the CAPEC logo are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Credits. All attack patterns.