Targeted attacks on civil society and non-governmental organizations have gone underreported despite the fact that these organizations have been shown to be frequent targets of these attacks. In this paper, we shed light on targeted malware attacks faced by these organizations by studying malicious e-mails received by 10 civil society organizations (the majority of which are from groups related...

Rapid and efficient judgments about the significance of social threat are important for species survival and may recruit specialized neurocognitive systems, consistent with biological models of threat processing. We review cognitive, psychophysiological, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence in support of specialized neural networks subserving the processing of facial displays of threat...

German social theorist Ulrich Beck has suggested that the political economy of post-industrial society has shifted away from the competition among relatively well-defined social groups for control of benefit streams resulting from technological and organizational innovations that characterized the roughly 200-year period of industrialization. In its place, we find constantly changing aggregates...

Social engineering is a method of attack involving the exploitation of human weakness, gullibility and ignorance. Although related techniques have existed for some time, current awareness of social engineering and its many guises is relatively low and efforts are therefore required to improve the protection of the user community. This paper begins by examining the problems posed by social engin...

As most employees are information-workers nowadays, they are very vulnerable to various malicious attacks. However, some threat sources have realized that it is far easier to obtain wanted information directly from authorized users than using software or other means to obtain such information. This is generally referred to as Social Engineering. Therefore, organizations are at risk, because mos...

This article reviews social neuroscience research on the experience of stigma from the target’s perspective. More specifi cally, we discuss several research programs that employ electroencephalography, event-related potentials, or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to examine neural correlates of stereotype and social identity threat. We present neuroimaging studies that show brain a...

We investigated the dependence of threat perception and reaction on social distance estimation. Social identity threat was imposed within a 2x2 between subjects design, with N=163 students reading a criticising comment about their ingroup assigned to originate from one of two possible outgroups. The participants completed parts of the scale Overlap of self, ingroup and outgroup (OSIO, Schubert ...