Social Engineering Attacks On Critical Infrastructures

A social engineering attack relies on human interaction and often involves tricking people into breaking normal security protocols (Social Engineering). The most popular types of social engineering attacks are baiting, phishing, spear phishing, pretexting, scareware, tailgating, and quid pro quo (Social Engineering). These attacks happen every day, and no one is more wise until someone loses a mass amount of money or runs into computer problems.

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.

The first of these threats is Social Engineering. Social Engineering according to Social-Engineer.org (2013), is “the act of influencing a person to accomplish goals that may or may not be in the ‘target’s’ best interest. This may include obtaining information, gaining access, or getting the target to take certain action.” The employees themselves are the area of the system affected by this threat. Social Engineering exploits their naivety. General lack of experience in recognizing this type of attack is a major reason for its success. Education on what Social Engineering is and how to recognize attacks coupled with company policies written, put into place, and enforced to prevent individuals from divulging or even having access to certain information no matter the scenario is the recommended course of action.

According to Mitnick, social engineering in information security simply means the psychological manipulation of people so as to divulge confidential information. It involves some kind of confidence trick with the aim of gathering information, committing fraud or getting access to the system . This is very different for the traditional conning but is one of the processes that the social engineering process that is more complex.

A Social engineering attack is a technique used by the hacker to trick people so they give up confidential information. The most important information the criminals are seeking are peoples’ passwords, bank information, social security number and much more. Reading through the website http://www.social-engineer.org/, I can tell that no one is safe from social engineering attack. One example that makes me think that way is the case of Maario Coleman and Angela Russell. These two guys were able to collect students’ information on the graduation ceremonies and create target lists. The pair then used online databases to find matching social security numbers and birthdates before applying for loans in the students’ names. Social engineering attack

It is recommended that we conduct a test that would simulate that breach. The test results should be anonymous as the goal of the test is to improve the company's security posture in a way that improves the entire company's security. After the test is complete, the results should be used to assist in designing training for employees on understanding and dealing with potential social engineering attacks. After developing the training, new policies and procedures should be disseminated, then the training can include understanding and reviewing the new policies and procedures. After the training is completed another test should be done to measure engagement and effectiveness of the social engineering training. This information should be used to improve training. The goal of the training would be to empower employees with situational awareness skills that would assist them in identifying potential social engineering attempts and how to respond

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.

4. Security Awareness: A large percentage of successful attacks do not necessarily exploit technical vulnerabilities. Instead they rely on social engineering and people’s willingness to trust others. There are two extremes: either employees in an organization totally mistrust each other to such an extent that the sharing of data or information is nil; or, at the other end of the scale, you have total trust between all employees. In organizations neither approach is desirable. There has to be an element of trust throughout an organization but checks and balances are just as

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 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

The criminals that are involved in social engineering are pursuing information by tricking you into giving out your passwords or bank data. They also access your computer to corruptly install malicious software that will give them access to your personal information. Common social engineering attacks are emails from a friend, baiting situations like offering new music, phishing attempts like test messages, and etc. Many ways to elude these type of attacks like investigating the matter, delete any invitation for financial information, or reject requests for help or proposals of

The attacker(s) use social engineering to obtain the information from the organizations. First, the attackers would send emails to the employees of the organizations as if they were executives or part of the company. The emails contained attachments, such as Microsoft Offices files, that were loaded with exploit code so that when the employee opened the file, it will execute the exploit code compromising the computer. Also, a Trojan was executed when the file was opened and it attempts to connect the remote site that hardcoded into the virus. When the Trojan successfully contacted the remote site, the attacker(s) had control over the employee’s computers and compromised the information that they wanted. In this situation, the best way to protect a company from this types of attacks is by conducting training in which employees are introduced to the different ways the company could be attacked, how to identify these attacks, and what to

The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and

Users: This can include social engineering threats, misconfiguration of equipment, and inside threats where employees steal or leak information intentionally.