Socially Engineering a Polarizing Discourse on Facebook through Malware-Induced Misperception

This paper reports the findings of a study testing a novel social engineering attack called Malware-induced Misperception (MIM). The goal of the MIM attack is to induce misperception by using a man-in-the-middle malware that covertly rearranges the linguistic content of an authentic social media post, web page, or an e-mail. The MIM attack was tested in controlled settings ( ) where the malware covertly manipulated the linguistic content of a Facebook discourse to induce misperception about the climate of opinion on a polarizing issue (freedom of speech on college campuses) by making conservative-leaning comments appear as liberal-leaning. The induced misperception was assessed in the context of the spiral-of-silence theory. The theory predicts that polarizing issues discourage commenting on social media if an individual's opinion diverges from the perceived climate of opinion on that issue. Consistent with the theory, the results suggest that the MIM attack can socially engineer the spiral-of-silence effect by manipulating the comments in a Facebook discourse to appeal to the individual's political ideology and gender identity. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Malware-Induced Misperception (MIM); spiral-of-silence; social engineering; Facebook, web security