The Click Reflex: How Curiosity Becomes A Cybersecurity Vulnerability
Key Takeaways
- Curiosity hijacks attention: When a message hints at hidden information, the need to “find out” often overrides caution.
- Curiosity drives 41% to click: Research shows people with higher curiosity scores are significantly more likely to click phishing links, even in unsolicited emails.
- “Check this out” works alarmingly well: Minimal curiosity prompts successfully bypass critical thinking, proving cybercriminals don’t need elaborate schemes to exploit our information-seeking impulses.
What is Curiosity in Social Engineering?
Bad actors exploit curiosity in social engineering by attacking our natural drive to seek information and resolve knowledge gaps. While curiosity drives people to explore new solutions, ask better questions, and challenge the status quo, it also represents one of the most common emotional susceptibilities that cybercriminals exploit.
NINJIO’s proprietary data found that curiosity-based phishing tests are the most frequently deployed across organizations. This frequency is no accident, since curiosity is a universal experience. Every person, regardless of their role, age group, or cybersecurity awareness level, is susceptible to some degree.
Cybercriminals only need to create one thing to exploit this susceptibility: an information gap. When a message hints that there is something you should see, hear, or know, your brain shifts into information-seeking mode. Sometimes, these shifts happen before security instincts catch up.
How Cybercriminals Use Curiosity Against You
Cybercriminals rely on simple, low-effort tactics to trigger information-seeking behavior. Curiosity rarely needs complex pretexts. Instead, curiosity-based social engineering tactics utilize minimal cues that imply something interesting, urgent, or personally relevant.
The “Check This Out” Trap
Research published in the European Journal of Information Systems examined the personal traits, message characteristics, and internet experience that increase susceptibility to phishing.
The findings revealed that 41.3% of participants clicked on phishing links in unsolicited emails, with curiosity serving as a significant predictor of clicking behavior. Those scoring higher on curiosity measures demonstrated an increased likelihood of interacting with vague or intriguing messages.
The study tested a deliberately simple email, with a subject line of “Check this out” and a body consisting only of “Check this out: [link]”. This bare-bones approach worked remarkably well, demonstrating how little effort cybercriminals need to trigger information-seeking behavior.
There are no personalization, urgency, or impersonated authority figures involved in these attacks—just a vague suggestion that something exists that is worth checking out.
In a different study, researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin investigated “the perverse side of curiosity”. They found that people will sometimes seek to satisfy their curiosity even if they expect negative consequences. In the context of a working environment, an employee might notice something feels off or even absurd, yet click anyway, driven by the simple need to know.
These studies reinforce how cybercriminals exploit curiosity by presenting just enough information to make recipients “want to know more,” prompting risky clicks that bypass usual skepticism.
Social Engineering Signs
Curiosity-based social engineering creates a gap between what you know and what you might discover. If a message feels vague, intriguing, or incomplete, that gap is intentional. Legitimate communications are usually contextually direct and clear, not designed to make you think, “what is this?”.
Social Engineering & Professional Curiosity
NINJIO’s CISO Guide to Social Engineering Susceptibilities emphasizes that phishing is highly effective at leveraging curiosity by offering access to information. Real-world examples of curiosity-based social engineering include messaging like:
- “You won’t believe what happened at yesterday’s meeting.”
- “See what your colleagues are saying about the new policy.”
- “Interesting article about our industry.”
- “Someone mentioned you in a document.”
- Or just standard business communication templates like Microsoft Teams notifications or Google Drive file-sharing alerts.
Each message creates an information gap—a space between what you know and what you might discover. That gap becomes magnetic, pulling people toward risky clicks before critical assessment can intervene.
The Professional Pressure to Stay Informed
Curiosity becomes even harder to ignore in environments where staying informed is tied to job performance. Many employees take pride in being responsive, plugged in, and aware of organizational developments. Cybercriminals use this to their advantage.
Workplace culture reinforces curiosity. When people receive a message suggesting insider information, competitive intelligence, or team updates, the instinct to click often overrides security instincts.
How is Curiosity Exploited Alongside Other Emotional Susceptibilities?
Curiosity is often combined with other emotional susceptibilities to increase a phishing attack’s chances of success:
- Curiosity + Urgency: “This link expires in 10 minutes.”
- Curiosity + Opportunity: “See how your team’s performance ranks.”
- Curiosity + Sociableness: “Photos from last night’s event.”
When two emotional cues appear together, a person’s attention splits between the information gap and the emotional load. This cognitive processing overload reduces the likelihood of deliberate analysis. Developing each person’s individual Emotional Susceptibility Profile helps organizations understand which attack combinations pose the most significant risk to their security posture.
Channeling Curiosity Toward Defense
Suppressing curiosity is not the next best move here; Organizations still rely on it for sparking the innovation that helps people better achieve the mission. Instead, employees need to be able to redirect their information-seeking instincts toward safer, more deliberate behaviors. You can achieve this by encouraging the actions below:
Make Verification a Default Habit
Encourage employees to pause before clicking and ask simple questions: “Who sent this? Can I verify through another channel? What happens if I wait?”
Normalizing quick confirmation through Slack, phone, or in-person check-ins ensures that verification feels routine. Personalized security coaching that focuses on each person’s emotional susceptibility helps these habits become automatic.
Run Simulated Phishing Exercises
Emotional susceptibility is not one-size-fits-all. One employee might click on links to an urgent ticket request, while another might click on a curiosity-driven link that says ‘A surprise for you!’
Simulated phishing exercises that identify individual emotional susceptibilities allow organizations to deliver targeted scenarios that mirror real curiosity cues, making training more relevant and impactful.
Build a Healthy Cybersecurity Culture
When employees are aware of various technologies and social engineering tactics, they naturally become more cautious. Routinely updated cybersecurity awareness training programs should educate individuals on the different technologies and social engineering tactics that cybercriminals use to stay effective.
Curiosity will always be part of how people think and work. The difference between safe and unsafe behavior comes down to whether that curiosity is guided or exploited. Giving employees the awareness, space, and support to verify before they click turns an instinct into a strong layer of defense.
Ready to transform curiosity from a liability into an asset? Schedule a demo to see how NINJIO’s human risk management platform builds emotional defenses against different social engineering tactics.
Frequently Asked Questions
A: Curiosity-based attacks require minimal setup and work universally. Unlike obedience or greed, curiosity is triggered by simple prompts like “check this out,” making it the most efficient emotional exploitation to incorporate into an attack vector.
A: FOMO relates to opportunity, such as fearing you’ll miss benefits others receive. Curiosity is pure information-seeking without expectations of gain. You click to know, not to avoid losing advantages. Cybercriminals exploit both emotions in social engineering attacks.
A: Yes. Effective cybersecurity awareness training redirects curiosity toward verification behaviors and safe information channels, promoting responsible online behavior. When people understand social engineering tactics, their curiosity about cybersecurity becomes a defensive asset.
A: Generic prompts, such as “Check this out,” achieve high click rates. Personalized phishing emails tied to professional interests (industry news, company updates, colleague mentions) can make these emails even more effective.
A: No. Curiosity drives innovation and learning. Train employees to channel it productively by verifying sources, questioning unexpected requests, and investigating through secure channels before clicking on links.
About NINJIO
NINJIO’s human risk management platform reduces cybersecurity risk through personalized security coaching, engaging awareness training, and adaptive testing. Our multi-pronged approach to risk mitigation focuses on the latest attack vectors to build employee knowledge and the behavioral science behind social engineering to sharpen users’ intuition. Our simulated phishing and coaching tools build a proprietary Emotional Susceptibility Profile for each user to identify their specific social engineering vulnerabilities and change behavior.
