Deception in cyberspace: An empirical study on a con man attack

Deception happens in social life. Social life is now omnipresent in cyber domains. As a result, deception is also evident in cyberspace. Deception in cyberspace is diverse and often differs from traditional social deceptions. Deception has a cost or a loss, often incurred by the victim of the deception. Hence it is important to detect deceptions, and to protect assets. In this work, we carry out analyses for a type of deception known as a con man attack. Out work is in the context of Cloud services. The consumers of Cloud services can be victims of this type of deception. Cloud service providers exhibiting con man behaviors may do so to maximize profits or to minimize their costs. The losses incurred may be directly financial or subtle, such as loss of reputation, customer base, or good will. In our work, a con resistant trust algorithm is applied to detect deception. The results of the detection are compared with a comparable computational trust algorithm. The comparison reveals that the con resistant trust algorithm provides the best results.