Can social influence be exploited to compromise security: An online experimental evaluation

While social media enables users and organizations to obtain useful information about technology like software and security feature usage, it can also allow an adversary to exploit users by obtaining information from them or influencing them towards injurious decisions. Prior research indicates that security technology choices are subject to social influence and that these decisions are often influenced by the peer decisions and number of peers in a user’s network. In this study we investigated whether peer influence dictates users’ decisions by manipulating social signals from peers in an online, controlled experiment. Human participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk played a multi-round game in which they selected a security technology from among six of differing utilities. We observe that at the end of the game, a strategy to expose users to high quantity of peer signals reflecting suboptimal choices, in the later stages of the game successfully influences users to deviate from the optimal security technology. This strategy influences almost 1.5 times the number of users with respect to the strategy where users receive constant low quantity of similar peer signals in all rounds of the game.