Social Engineering Is A Powerful Tool Used By Cyber Criminals

According to TechTarget.com, the definition of spear phishing is an email spoofing attack that targets a specific organization or individual, seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information. Unless a student, faculty member, staff, or alumni are knowledgeable with IT procedures or programs, they will not know when they have become a target of a phishing attack. Recently, several Dartmouth students received emails that were claiming to be from the President of the University, however the messages were found to be malware, which is designed to steal information (“Don’t Take the Bait,” 2017).

You should never click on links that you don't trust or not sure about. Businesses usually never ask for your information through texts, pop-up messages, or email. Scammers may call and pretend to be from the government or a business to try to get you to give them sensitive information.

Hackers can gain access to the computer records of banks, credit card companies, hospitals, merchants, universities, government agencies, and other organizations. Though such breaches occur much more rarely than phishing, even one instance can give the hacker access to millions of people’s personal data, including Social Security numbers, birth certificates, driver’s license numbers, health records, employment records, and financial information. The FBI reports that, since

Answer 1.3.1: According to Ian Mann Social Engineering is, “To manipulate people by deception, into giving out information or performing an action”.

First of all, phishing attack is a kind of social engineering, where the attacker try to find out your login name and password simply by requesting. They usually pretends to be an authority figure, such as banking system, with a sense of urgency (for example if you don’t send your password, your account could potentially be froze). It is like an impersonation and deceit.

This study looked at phishing from a cognitive perspective. The study found that lack of knowledge, visual deception and lack of attention contribute to the success of a phishing attack. Further, the study found that individuals tend to not utilize context cues such as address bar, status bar and security indicators. These individuals were instead frequently influenced by visual presentations of the phishing

In legal terms, phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity through an electronic communication. First Anti-Phishing Act was drafted in 2005 to regulate phishing attacks, which did not passed. However it

The phishing attack is an easy-protect attack method but may cause many losses when it success. All staffs of IT department of University XYZ have the responsibility to fight against it for preventing the loss of themselves and public sources. Remember to keep eyes on every suspect email. There are specific rules every staffs should follow with.

Social Engineering is the hardest form of attack to defend against because it cannot be defended with hardware or software alone.

Some of the unknown email addresses disguise themselves as either ad services or just by pretending to help your needs such as life, health and car insurances. Individuals can have their identity stolen in a number of ways, including while swiping credit or debit cards at the cash registers of trustworthy retailers.Identity thieves use computer programs to infiltrate retail systems and begin siphoning off bank-card numbers when purchases are made. Point-of-sale system hacking is a serious and growing problem, according to business-security expert Kim Singletary. Singletary, director of technical solution marketing at McAfee, said the security-software company has discovered about 130 million unique malware programs which result in spam mail or just advertising fake products in either emails or just general websites that produce these types of malware from just about 1 million in

Delete any suspicious-looking emails you receive, especially if they sport links and/or attachments. Don’t even open them, just delete them. If they purport to come from legitimate organizations, verify with the organization in question first.

Net Phishing. Again the name is pretty self-explanatory. Imagine, like in Bible times or something, a fisherman with a net, he throws the net into the water to catch as many fish as possible. Similarly The Bad Guy will call thousands of random numbers telling them they won a prepaid visa card they

Although no one wants to see bills in the mailbox, when charges are made to accounts you must monitor the mail and if the bills are not received follow-up to be sure that someone is not stealing your mail or having it redirected to another location (Ten Ways Crooks Steal Your Identity, n.d.). In addition, if possible, use a locking mailbox to receive your mail especially if you live in a crime prevalent area (Ten Ways Crooks Steal Your Identity, n.d.). Another mechanism to stay alert of one’s accounts is to reconcile the bank statement each month, therefore if any fraudulent activity has occurred it can be discovered quickly (Ten Ways Crooks Steal Your Identity,

Anyone can fall for phishing. Your mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, or even your dog can fall for phishing. But what exactly is phishing? Phishing is the activity of defrauding an online account holder of financial information or passwords, or anything else important by pretending to be a legitimate company. Basically, it’s a scam. No one is safe from phishing!

PRE-TEXTING: This is one of the most popular and a valued technique a social engineer can use since it needs lots of research about the victim before the actual attack is carried out. In a typical pretext the con artist plans out a design that tend to influence a destined victim for performing certain actions that compromise the information confidentiality. An example of a highly publicized pretext attack is quoted from Wikipedia as [sw2] “On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that Hewlett-Packard 's general counsel, at the behest of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists