Digital Deception: Cyber Fraud and Online Misinformation

Phishing, user account takeovers, and other computing-related threats have made it easy for criminals to deceive people for financial and other gain. It is now considered standard practice for an advanced cyberattack, even a highly technical one, to start in a nontechnical manner: a spearphishing email deceiving an organization’s employees into providing their credentials, a watering hole website infecting their computer, and so on. It is the human that is the initial target, as well as the first line of defense. At the same time, social media has become a dominant, direct, and highly effective form of news generation and sharing at a global scale, in a manner that influences and enhances, but also challenges and often antagonizes, traditional media corporations. High-profile misinformation campaigns are now focused on social media because of the exceptional speed they can provide. By the time a piece of misinformation on the Coronavirus has been fact-checked and debunked, it has already achieved its aim: It has deceived people into forming an opinion, making a decision, or causing damage to an organization or group of people. As there is an exceptional diversity in the types of deception that are currently employed and in the platforms that are exploited in the process, suitably, this special issue hosts articles addressing the topic of digital deception and threats from a diverse range of points of view.