People Hacking: the Art of Social Engineering

Despite the presence of network security devices such as firewalls and other security appliances, today's corporate networks are still vulnerable to both internal and external attacks by hackers intent on creating havoc. By proactively

Social engineering has caused many problems for different organizations. Because of social engineering many businesses have to take extra steps to protect themselves and their information from being hacked. According to Bidgoli, Social Engineering is a type of attack that takes over the power of human aspects in order to trick the public into declaring confidential information(MIS 7, 2017). This hacking technique has obtained the attention of numerous organizations, businesses, and governments worldwide.

In the current society, business, organizations and government are very dependent on computers and Internet. Adequately protecting an organization 's information assets is a requisite issue. Many organizations have deployed security software or devices, such as firewalls or intrusion detection systems, to help protect their information assets and to quickly identify potential attacks. IBM Systems Journal states that "some organizations came to realize that one of the best ways to evaluate the intruder threat to their interests would be to have independent computer security professionals attempt to hack into their computer systems" (IBM 2001). This might be a good way to evaluate the system vulnerability. However, to allow a penetration test team break into their systems, the organization may have faces some risks. For example, the penetration test team may fail to identify significant vulnerabilities; sensitive security information may be disclosed, increasing the risk of the organizations being vulnerable to external attacks (The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants). Some organization even send their system administrator to be trained Ethical Hacking as a career course in Tertiary

The data breaches at Target, Home Depot are reminders to CIOs of how deadly social engineering can be. CIO’s and CSO’s realize the dangers of security problems on a massive scale. These are some deliberate security breaches that happen when an employee shares a password or loses a mobile device. An employee might access a website at work that loads malware onto his PC, which then spreads throughout the corporate network. In other cases, security breaches occur when a disgruntled employee leaves the company and takes with him valuable intellectual property that belongs to the company.

Over the last few years the amount of security breaches that have been reported have had one factor that has been prevalent in majority of the attacks. That factor is the employee’s and how they are manipulated into giving the intruder/hacker exactly what they needed without realizing it. The use of social engineering in data breaches and fraud has been steadily increasing over the years. Confidentiality, integrity, and availability the three components of the CIA triad in network security can all be compromised by the risk of social engineering.

Social Engineering has become a career for modern day cyber criminals. Thieves are waiting to prey on the vulnerable, and naïve. The situations, as devastating as they are to the victims, are very real. In some cases, unfortunately, the cybercrimes are life-altering and irreparable. This paper will highlight four real-life cases where social engineering techniques were used to obtain personal and corporate information.

Social engineering has a history of being used to collect and analyze information, however the information is commonly used for blackmailing reasons. There exist various definitions of social engineering depending on the type of attack that has occurred. Social engineering is described as the ability to deceive someone with the intention of breaching security levels (Shetty, p.1). It involves deceiving through the use of phones, computer or in-person. All that is needed is the information required for one to access the systems. Important evidence such as; computer systems is mostly disposed to to social engineering (Shetty, p.1). Often, social engineering occurs as a consequence of carelessness or gaps in security systems. It mainly

Social engineering refers to the techniques that are used by the criminals to manipulate people to give out their confidential information such as user names, passwords and bank accountants without being aware (Hadnagy, 2011). This technique is used by the criminals over the internet to trick people to disclose their confidential information rather than hacking the software installed on their PC. Social engineering takes different forms and it is perpetrated by the individuals who wants to take advantage of others after getting confidential information that allows them to access their accounts such as email or databases that contain protected information. For instance, a criminal who want to access another person’s email account may send

Social engineering is a way of manipulating people so that they can provide their personal information to the cyber criminals. These criminals try to trick the individuals to try to get their passwords and bank information or gain access over to that individual’s computer. Criminals think that it is easier to fool someone to give them their password then try to hack their password. Basically they target those people who don’t have any idea that their information can be misused by these criminals so they just give all of their information. These criminals gain trust of those people before they get those people’s information for their own benefit. Social engineering is one of the biggest problem that people should be more aware of so they can

Social engineering is a tactic used by fraudsters to gain sensitive information on individuals. Through various tactics information will be collected and combined together to obtain full names, account numbers, addresses, social security numbers, and dates of birth for prospective prospects. The techniques can be used separately or together and can provide sufficient personal information to fraudsters and aid them in many types of activity. As technology improves the various types of social engineering quickly change and adapt to different security systems. The most popular types of social engineering include phishing, vishing, and smishing. Through these activities fraudsters are able to obtain pieces of information through emails, text messages,

Significance: This topic is very significant to my audience because of the rise of cyber attacks at individual to national level. Ignorance of social engineering attack methods makes on a weak link where social engineering attacks can compromise individual, company, state and federal records

Social engineering is a method of hacking in which attackers utilize personal or not-so-personal information to impersonate the rightful owner of an account. They call up the company in question and engineer a ‘reset’ of the account permissions that allow them to take over. The idea is to trick a company's employee into revealing passwords or critical information that may be used to compromise security.

Social engineering has always been a threat, but has spiked particularly in the last two years. Hackers have increased the ways they can gain valuable information from computer systems before any suspicion arises, most often playing off human error or weakness. There are preventatives measures to take such as a firewall and installing anti-virus protection on a computer system. However, humans are naturally very trusting, and when that is combined with security gaps, it leads to the hackers gaining full control over the computer system.

Did you know that one of the biggest threats to information security is something we are interacting with on a day to day basis? The people around us can be a huge threat to security without us even realizing it. Social engineering is a non-technical attack used to gather and exploit confidential information (Avoiding Social Engineering). Although the definition that was just given is correct, Ian Mann (2012) also states that social engineering is better defined as “to manipulate people, by deception, into giving out information, or performing an action” (pg.12). Human interaction is the gateway to a social engineering attack, which means it can happen right under someone’s nose without them even realizing. The more advanced technology gets, the more deceptive and advanced hackers are getting. Today, social engineering accounts for 66% of all attacks performed by hackers (The Social Engineering Infographic).

What is social engineering? And what are the types of these attacks? I will remind the