Cyber criminals rely on mind games

McAfee has announced the results of a groundbreaking study that details the psychological games and other tactics cyber criminals use in social engineering scams propagated through junk email.In the study titled "Mind Games", the primary author, Dr James Blascovich, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers analyses of multiple common scam emails and provides surprising insights into how cyber criminals use fear, greed and lust to methodically steal personal and proprietary financial information.The same psychological practices used by cyber criminals were also investigated in a European report, commissioned by McAfee in association with leading forensic psychologist, Professor Clive Hollin, based at University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.