What if we Defeated Cybercriminals with an AI-Generated Voodoo ‘Curse Back’? Considering a Socially Engineered Ethical Alternative to Hacking Back

Cybercriminals are influenced by beliefs in the supernatural and paranormal as much as we are. This practitioner’s position paper will explore how artificially influencing a cybercriminal’s belief that someone is cursing them models an ethical, socially engineered alternative for behaviorally disrupting cybercriminals. Rather than ‘hacking back’ cybercriminals, this paper asks how Nigerian cybercriminals using Voodoo to threaten victims and competitors would respond behaviorally if they believed they had been Voodoo cursed. Even Nigerian cybercriminals who do not believe in or practice Voodoo have demonstrated they are culturally and socially vulnerable to the suggestion they have been cursed, and they often threaten others with curses. This practitioner’s paper visualizes an integrated framework of distrust and “sinister attribution error”, explaining how people generally respond to imagined and IRL events based on their beliefs, but particularly how Nigerian cybercriminals who use real and imagined Voodoo cursing are vulnerable to these cognitive errors when trying to make sense of their unfavorable or troubling life circumstances and experiences. Visualizing this integrated framework would involve ingesting Nigerian cybercriminal communications, where there is use of Voodoo and other curses to fine-tune an LLM to generate artificial intelligence content mimicking what appear to be curses directed at Nigerian cybercriminals. However, this practitioner’s paper will only attempt to position the behavioral foundations of this socially engineered ethical alternative to ‘hacking back’, for transgressive investigators with authorities and in some cases researchers or activists who believe there is a need to take a more aggressive approach to degrading Nigerian cybercriminal enterprises.