Modeling a Cyber Deception Practitioner's Approach: Behaviorally Exploiting an American Cybercriminal with Warranting Theory and Whaley's Unpublished Work on “Unexpected Players”

An American cybercriminal maintained unauthorized access to the networks of several professional sports leagues for years, making millions pirating their copyrighted live streaming content onto his own platform. When this cybercriminal masquerading as an administrator requested technical help on his subreddit, an undercover federal agent masquerading as a subreddit user engaged him publicly, proffering a technical solution. While supporting this investigation at the time as a profiler with this American federal law enforcement agency's cyber behavioral unit, the author recommended a custom cyber deception approach designed to behaviorally exploit this cybercriminal during an online discussion with the agent. This cyber deception practitioner's approach is markedly different than most perceptions of government and industry cyber deception, which is largely focused on deceptive infrastructure and other static decoy artifacts. This case study models a novel integrated application of a historical unpublished deception theory and a theory of online content evaluation against a cybercriminal, suggesting a transdisciplinary approach for practitioners based on behavioral analysis can broaden the applications of cyber deception inside and outside networks.