A Survey Study of Psybersecurity: An Emerging Topic and Research Area

When studying cybersecurity, the emphasis is generally given the personal information protection and the safeguarding of the technology on which the information is stored. Cybersecurity attacks, which can occur in multiple forms, can seriously affect the involved stakeholders mentally, and this impact aspect tends to be underestimated. With the human mind being a significant attack target, psybersecurity has begun gaining prominence as an important field of study. In this survey paper, we explore psybersecurity as an emerging interdisciplinary area within the human security domain of cybersecurity and conduct a detailed study of its causes plus effects. We discuss existing research work, which is relevant to this field of psybersecurity, and present a nifty organization of the surveyed literature, which is classified into three notable categories. With psychiatric engineering gaining prominence as a new impactful attack vector, a psybersecurity attack (PSA) primarily targets the human mind. We study the relations between cybersecurity and cyberpsychology, as well as between psychiatric engineering (PE) and social engineering (SE) from an interdisciplinary perspective. We perform a unique analysis of both PE and SE as PSA, linking them to Cialdini's six principles and their associated elements, as causes for PSA. We then show how to connect these causal components of PSA to the eight cyberpsychology dimensions through a tabular map that we have developed. We also discuss the emergence of COVID-driven PSA with a focus on the psybersecurity of online healthcare information (OHI) users, including potential ways of protecting the users of OHI from the increase of psybersecurity threats. We conclude this survey study by looking at the potential scope of future work in psybersecurity, including new research directions and open problems plus research questions.