Social Engineering Technology and Tools

Social engineering is a type of psychological attack where an attacker misleads you into doing something they want you to do. Social engineering is used every day by everyday people in everyday situations. A child trying to get her way in the candy aisle or an employee looking for a raise is using social engineering. Unfortunately, it is also present when criminals, con men, and the like trick people into giving away information that makes them vulnerable to crimes. Like any tool, social engineering is not good or evil, but simply a tool that has many different uses. Social engineering is lying to people to get information. Social engineering is being a good actor. Social engineering is knowing how to get stuff for free. Combining all these

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 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 – this is an attempt by an outside force to gain the trust of an employee to let them in the system.

In this day and age, where information is the new currency on the block, criminals are on the rise to acquire this information. The book highlights the different techniques and attacks of the social engineer and how easily we are persuaded into thinking that technology has secured us from these attacks. He shows these through a variety of stories that have actually happened as indications of our negligence to these attacks, but as well points out ways that we can protect ourselves from these attacks and become less victimized by the social engineer. He gets us to look through

Environmental and social situations are more powerful to determine a person’s behavior than personality differences. Psychology is basically the study of the human mind to be able to understand a human’s actions, emotions, behaviors, reactions and attitudes. Using a scientific approach social psychologists study everyday actual problems to determine behavior and characteristics of the social situation. Social psychology was strengthened by researchers like Solomon Asch in the 1905’s who made an attempt to understand the significance of conformity pressures in social groups and how people in authority could influence by peer pressure. In today’s society social psychology has expanded in many areas and is compared to other related

All employees will be required to take a social engineering course and the HR department will document the entire employee training regardless of their position in the company. The company will also provide email training on how to determine if someone is trying to use social engineering on the employee to gain information they should not have. During the training the company procedures and policy will address what can happen when these policies are violated. The company could consider using honey spot server, which would have a fake email server and other application server, in which a hacker will think they are on the live systems, but will really be on a fake systems and have alarms setup to inform the IT staff of any intrusion. To prevent spoofing, the IT staff can set up email authentication using signed and secure email message format. This encryption method will allow the sender encrypt the message with the receiver public key. The receiver will use the sender public key to verify the message and use his or her own private key to decrypt the

But another meaning of social engineering that relates more to information security than political sciences is the act of psychologically directing humans in such a way to make them reveal sensitive information or perform some tasks. So this report aims at answering question with regards to the identity of a typical social engineer, what the techniques used by social engineers are, what makes a real protected system

Social engineering is often referred to as a technique a person, through use of deception, uses to gain trust and to fool a person into providing information that he/she would not typically freely give for the use of malicious intent. However, some would argue this definition should be broadened to include that it may or may not be for malicious intent, as some professions use social engineering for testing security measures (Hadnagy, 2011). For the remainder of the paper social engineering is in reference to as one with malicious intent.

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 one of the most overlooked aspects of information security and yet it is the easiest way for someone – usually an employee - to gain access to restricted information on a computer network. Attacks can be either physical or psychological; each can be equally effective in acquiring confidential information. Methods used to get information can be either human- or computer-based, with different psychological reasons why each method works. Protecting against social engineers boils down to policies that guard against their attacks, but these policies must also be complemented with an effective security awareness program in order to be successful.

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 is coined as the art of human hacking. While it is great to be ahead of the game with all those fancy firewalls, switches and routers many companies fall short on one of the most important aspects of security, Social Engineering. Social Engineering is the one thing that will not trigger a single alarm and will bypass all of a company’s defenses. In a scenario, a few investigators show up at your local office and show their badges and ask for a tour of the place. You 're legally required to allow these investigators access in order for them to do their job. They ask a plethora of questions, even some that may seem out of the ordinary, looking at your physical security systems, asking for passwords, taking any readings they can off of everything and storing the information. They seem to be experts at their job, so you don’t question any of their alarming methods; however, they are actually security consultants conducting a Social Engineering 'penetration test ' or experiment and grabbing access cards, installing keystroke loggers, stealing passwords and generally getting away with as much of your business 's private information as they can get their hands on. Social engineers take advantage of human behavior and they aren 't worried about getting through your firewalls, switches, routers or other online defenses. Even your ‘fancy’ biometrics won 't mean much if your users are tricked into clicking on a malicious link they think came from a friend on the

Information gathering, through networking, social media, and both on and offline storage have made it easier to collect information about an individual than ever before, with many concerns having arisen over the years about privacy and the ability to protect that privacy. As debates over personally identifiable information continue, one cornerstone remains a constant, ethics. Ethics are defined as “the standard by which human actions can be judged right and wrong (Online, 2012)”, but even that can be debated when discussed within the realm of information technology. Have you ever been to an internet shopping site and “trusted” the secure connection? Essentially, you are entrusting an inanimate system developed by an individual or group

It takes time and money to adjust IT security measures in response to evolving attack tactics. As defenders gradually update their security measures, attackers respond accordingly. Such arms-race dynamics lead to threats of increasing sophistication and efficiency. Today’s cybercriminals often have a long-term interest in their targets and often employ social engineering to get inside a protected environment. Their tactics commonly include malicious payload that attempts to compromise the victim’s system and may continue spreading within the organization. They also increasingly focus on weaknesses at the application, rather than system or network levels, to obtain data that provide the most value.