Social Engineering is a type of manipulation hacking strategy formed by people who want to gain confidential information of their targets into accessing the individuals' system maliciously. These people who use Social Engineering fabricate pretexts for users to gain their trust into revealing their information easily.
Types of Social Engineering| How Does It Work?
How The Cycle of Social Engineering Works:
Gathering Information>Planning Attacks>Acquiring Tools>Use Acquired Knowledge>Execute Attack
Gathering Information: In the first stage, the hacker will learn as much as they can about the intended victim. The information is gathered from company websites, personal social media, other publications, even by talking to the users by disguising themselves.
Planning the Attack and using gathered knowledge: The attackers will outline the areas into how they will initiate the plan of a data breach, Use acquired knowledge according to their social engineering strategy such as pet names, anniversary dates, birthdates of the organization founders, etc.
Acquire Tools: These include a bunch of computer programs that an attacker will use while launching the said attack.
Execute Attack: Exploit the weaknesses of users in the target system.
Social Engineering centers largely around the manipulation of humans by hackers confidence and persuasion skills, though this can happen by using various techniques:
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Through Emotional Exploitation
We lean towards giving our information to whom we are familiar with, the heightened emotions are the means that hackers use as their weapon to swipe the important credential information, etc, let us assume the colleagues at the social event, sit beside you, gets familiar at drinks and you let your login details or bank card details to them. The emotions that occur after familiarization include greed, jealously, guilt, excitement, anger, and curiosity aka the weapons that a social engineer uses to pluck information into your belongings. These details will lead them into your email accounts and wallets troubling your finances and security greatly.
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Through Phishing
Through trickery and impersonating as a genuine website you trust. Phishing is basically a subset of Social Engineering and is widespread and most popularly used to obtain people’s data by deceit. They do phishing by imitating a website service a user trust, such as Yahoo into giving you account login credentials and passwords.
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Through Tailgating
Tailgating is also known as piggybacking, It is the act of trailing a user or an authorized staff member into a restricted-access area. Potential Attackers may play the role of social courtesy to get you to hold the door for them or somehow convincing you into believing that they are also authorized to be in that restricted area. And as a human courtesy or by any other circumstance the user will most likely let the social engineer inside the restricted area section.
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Thorugh Malware
Every Type of new as well as old malware can be used to achieve Social Engineering, specially Scareware-also a form of malware that is used to frighten users into taking immediate action. This deceptive malware uses unnerving warnings that sometimes consist of reporting fake malware infections or claiming into you believing that one of your accounts has been compromised. Therefore pushing you into buying fraudulent cybersecurity software services, or sharing private details like your account credentials.
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Through Quid Pro Quo Attacks
Quid pro quo is a term that roughly states “a favor for a favor,” Attackers promise to help that will benefit the user but will require an action from the victim in exchange. For example, the social engineer may dial random extensions at a company, pretending to be calling back on a technical support inquiry. When they identify a user who genuinely has a support issue, they pretend to help their issue and will instruct them to perform certain malicious actions that will compromise their machine.
These attacks can also come from getting you excited or curious for something valuable that comes with cheap investment on your end, resulting in the attacker simply taking your data with no reward for you.
Mitigation Practices of Social Engineering.
Never leave your PC unattended
Keep your device to yourself and always make sure to lock your PC and mobile networks whenever at work, and especially at public spaces like coffee houses and airports.
Invest in a good System Security Software
Feelings can be compromised, behaviors in terms of software security may take some time to control, but IGS Cleaner which is the Best PC Cleaner Software is downloaded quickly and will never let your data be compromised by a social engineer—doing quick scans, maintaining the overall health and keeping the data always updated are some measures that will never let your system be in the hands of an imposter.
