Phishing : A System Of Social Engineering Essay

The phishing email itself is also violating a law. This would fall under Title 18 Crimes and Criminal procedure, part 1, chapter 4, § 1028: "Fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information”. While there has been attempts in the past to introduce and pass laws that specifically apply to phishing attempts none of these laws have made it on the books.

As value customers of the Anthem, Inc. we believe it is important to keep each one of you informed of any incident that might affect your business with us. Your privacy and security is our priority for the reason Anthem, Inc. would like to inform our customers of a recent phishing attack. Unfortunately, we have experienced similar attacks in the past which led many of the employees and customers’ data exposed to hackers. Even though this is a serious matter for the company and the customers it is important for us to make our customers aware that phishing attacks are common and they cause huge losses to both the customers and the companies (Wright et al., 2014). Our most recent attack took place on April 2014 and it affected about 80 million identifiable data stolen via phishing emails. The

Phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity through an electronic communication. [ Compl. ¶ 28, ECF No. 1.]

Dhamija, R., Tygar, J. D., & Hearst, M. (2006, April). Why phishing works. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 581-590). ACM.

Since our sponsor university is located in Massachusetts, where there is no direct single state law on anti-phishing. It is important to understand legal phishing definition, and laws applicable if University XYZ faces any phishing attack. In this section, apart from explaining federal statute and related punishment for phishing attack, details are given on government agencies that University XYZ can approach for phishing attack investigation.

The internet has brought upon a new revolution of global interconnection where contacting someone on the other side of the world is just a click away, but with this international phenomenon comes an increased susceptibility with unfamiliar technology. Internet crime is compiled of all non-physical crime with the aid of a computer. Although broad in definition internet crimes are largely composed of acts such as cyber fraud, ‘phishing’ (username and password hacking), cyber stalking and hacking. Internet crime does not pose an overwhelming issue in society in terms of its

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

If a random person with an official-looking business card approached you and asked for your Social Security card, driver's license and other sensitive information, you probably wouldn't give it to them. For one reason or another, however, people are more easily duped when it comes to online interactions. It's far easier to pull the wool over people's eyes, which is why phishing attacks are so rampant. Phishing refers to the act of obtaining victims' sensitive information by posing as trusted companies and organizations. It is usually carried out through spoofed emails and spoofed websites that urgently ask for various types of information. There are many potential consequences, and identity theft is among the very worst of them.

Bank of America is a multinational banking institute and one of the most trusted in the banking industry. This organizations sole purpose is to protect the customer’s confidentiality and assets by ensuring that data protection is the number one priority; however any organization when holding personal information can be a victim of data breach and BoA is not exempt. One of the largest risks BoA faces today is Mobile Banking. This consumer convenience is used by fifty percent of smart phone owners (Finney, 2014). Phishing is also threat to the banking industry; this strategy by hackers allows the extraction of consumer passwords and other sensitive information. Hackers targeting banking institution employees with convincing e-mails that fool them into clicking on malicious links-which ultimately compromise their credentials or

Phishing attacks are the most well-known attacks that can be devastating. Most people have heard of phishing, but some do not know what it is. Phishing is an attack that is used on websites, email, and any type of communication on the internet. This tricks the user into giving them information by either telling them they were hacked or by playing on their emotions. An example of phishing is someone sending out an email that looks exactly like a Facebook email and asking the victim to change their password due to their account being compromised. Once they click on the

Reconnaissance – Attackers may depend on social engineering to gain information, access, and data to a companies inner-working; This include finding out policies, office building security protocols; even dumpster diving for any information that could be used to initiate a scanning procedure. Counter measures for these methods include, enforcing employees to comply with security policies, constantly train employees in the methods of social engineering by attackers; this includes over the phone conversations subjecting an employee into disclosing any type of company information, no matter how innocent the information may seem (an alternative excuse for employees is to refer to company’s website), installation of security cameras, and use

Did you know that from 2005-2009 the internet scams rose from 100,000 per year to nearly 300, 000 per year (Internet Scam Statistics). From 2010- 2012 it continues to rise beyond 350,000 per year, with a monetary loss of over $300 million per year.

The increasing volume and sophistication of cyber security threats including targeted data theft, phishing scams and other online vulnerabilities demand that we remain vigilant about securing our systems and information.

Instead of attempting to directly obtain credentials for a financial site, social networking and email sites are targeted. The attack seeks to obtain username and password combinations, on the (likely) assumption that in many cases, users will use the same or similar combinations on other web sites. The second part of the attack is to conduct a CSS History Hack, where the phishers can determine whether the user has visited specified sites.31 The CSS History Hack uses the ‘a:visited’ component in CSS which alters the behavior of links that have been visited.32 Banking sites visited by users may be obtained, and the phishers can then visit these and attempt to gain access using the compromised credential combinations.

With the beginning of internet, various online attacks have been increased and among them, the most popular attack is phishing. Phishing is an online security attack where the hacker targets in achieving sensitive information like passwords, credit card information etc. from the users by making them to believe what they see is what it is. It is the combination of social engineering and technical methods to convince the user to reveal their personal data. The paper discusses about the Phishing social engineering attack theoretically and their issues in the life of human Beings. At the same time this paper also provides different techniques to detect these attacks so that they can be easily dealt with in case one of them occurs. The paper gives a thorough survey of various Phishing attacks along with their preventive measures.