Taking a Look at Social Engineering

Identity theft is the stealing and use of someone’s personal information and is one of the fastest growing crimes in the nation (Dole, 2005). According to Federal Trade Commission estimates, identity thieves victimize approximately 10 million Americans every year at a cost of an astonishing $50 billion (2005). Identity theft has been going on for years now and is easily done with the help of today’s technology. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are six common ways that identity thieves get a hold of personal information. The varieties of methods that are used are dumpster diving, skimming, phishing, changing the victim’s address, stealing, and pretexting (Federal Trade Commission). Once someone’s identity is stolen,

While identity theft was present in society previous to the appearance of the internet, this medium has provided thieves with an intriguing method to steal identities from people without even having to leave their house. "Today, more and more people engage in online financial activities such as shopping, banking, investing, and bill paying." (Understanding Identity Theft) While this reflects positively on people's lives by saving them significant time, it also exposes them to a world of

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.

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

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

This study conducted a large scale phishing experiment in a university with more than 10,000 subjects. The initial phishing attack involved spoofed email that redirects a user to a website to change their password, both males and females in the experiment were equally deceived. The second part of the attack used a survey to harvest personal information, this found that 61% of the victims were males compared to only 39%

This paper analyzes the social engineering technology and the social engineering tools that are used to test the human element with regard to its capabilities and limitations in the areas of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The analysis covers Social engineering Toolkits usefulness, cost, and implementation complexity and how its effectiveness can be enhanced.

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.

Identity theft is one of the growing crimes in the United States due to the fact people do not know how to properly protect themselves against it. Criminals use different methods to acquire the information necessary to steal someone’s identity. Some of the techniques used to commit identity theft are; stealing wallets, acquiring bank information or pilfering through trash to find documents containing PII (FBI, n.d.). Nowadays criminals are able to steal people’s identity using different procedures over the internet without having to compromise their identity. Some of the methods are social engineering, phishing, sending spam messages and malware (OLI, 2013). Criminals use these methods because with the use of technology, identity theft could be accomplished anonymously and without much effort. Also because people lower their guard about securing their personally identifiable information when using the internet, especially when using social networks, they become easy targets to

Many wonder what is a social engineer and want to know what is that they do and why do they do it. Social engineer is the art of manipulating people so that they give the social engineer important information. A social engineer could be considered people who know you personally or someone who do not know you at all. If it’s a person you have not met, they would manipulate you to make it seems as they are trusted individual. Social engineering sometimes look for the flaws within a company or an individual and use that for their gain. In my PowerPoint I stated that social engineer are basically the “scientific” term for a hacker. They “phish” the brain to retrieve what is needed and moved to the next vulnerable person or company.

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

Ans: Social engineering is the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using hacking techniques. The types of information these criminals are seeking can vary, but when individuals are targeted the criminals are usually trying to trick you into giving them your passwords or bank information, or access your computer to secretly install malicious software–that will give them access to your passwords and bank information as well as giving them control over your computer.

Phishing has become one of the most successful methods cyber attackers use for hacking an organization. It has become effective because it targets the weakest link, people. Cyber attackers understand that the easiest way to hack into an organization, infecting someone’s computer or gain someone’s password is to simply ask. Phishing works by sending an email to millions of people pretending to be something they know or trust, such as a well-known bank, online store, or government organization. The attackers do not have a specific target in mind nor do they now exactly who will fall victim, they simply know the more phishing emails they send out, the more people they can fool. Their goal is to trick people into providing the phishers with their private information. 2015 saw an increase of 23% of users opening phishing messages and 11% of users click on the attachment (Verizon, 2015). Further, phishing still remains as one of the top two concerns that organizations have and the numbers are growing. Since 2014 phishing concerns by the organizations have been increasing every year (Cyber Edge, 2016) and more money is put invested in technological means. Many organizations use technical means such as filtering messages, detection of fraudulent websites, and developing anti-phishing warning systems (Egelman et al. 2008). However technical means are incapable of removing the threat of phishing (Abbasi et al. 2012; Dhamija et al. 2006) because an organizations weakest link, the

Social Engineering is a method for getting data by trickiness. Programmers are very much aware that individuals are the weakest connection in any Information Technology (IT) security or IT confirmation program. They trap clients into uncovering data of interest and inspire clients to perform errands that may bring about mischief to their association. The social engineering assault may be separated into two separate entities; the physical entity and mental/mind entity. The Physical entity gathers data by going to a work location utilizing phone calls, online talk, or email contact. Programmers then utilize this data against the association amid the mind/mental entity. Statements of power, a characteristic propensity to be useful, loving and

Phishing is a serious problem in the progressively limitless service of the internet. There are many ways to trick the people to disclose the information by using social engineering attack. It can take form of spam email, fake