The Simplest Guide to Social Engineering Attacks and Their Prevention

In the modern era of technology, the dimension of intrusion in your internet life has been changed drastically, and it’s no more limited to malware, virus, spam, worms, trojan and any other frightening term. The new dimension of hacking is the Social Engineering Attacks and such type of attackers generally implement social skills in getting what they want, be it your personal information or credit card or whatever.

But don’t you worry if you are here then we are here to help you in understanding them and how to save yourself from them. Just follow the guide and you will be well familiar with them:

Types of Social Engineering Attacks

1

Pretexting

In this type of attack, the attacker presents itself as someone else with the purpose of extracting information or espionage; the social engineer generally assumes a certain identity that could be trusted by their target in order to extract information from the target. The attacker could assume any identity; it may be your wife’s distant cousin or any other relative that the social engineer thinks will be trusted by you. So to safeguard yourself from such attacker you have to vigilant enough in dealing with the people.

2

Tailgating

This method is also known as piggybacking in this; the social engineer gains unauthorized access to a building by bypassing the authentication. To do this, the social engineer could assume any role be it a maintenance personnel, delivery person or any other role in uniform so that he could get easy access.

3

Dumpster Diving

This method is pretty much self-explanatory, in this the social engineer salvages the data that has been dumped by their target; remember those paper shredders. The thing is that a whole lot of people still dump their valuable information in the trash that could be salvaged by the attackers resulting in ultimate harm to the victim. You know what the information could be it could be just anything that is not relevant to you, but it could be very much important for a social engineer, so I better not go into it.

4

Shoulder Surfing

This term explains itself, in this type of social engineering attack the social engineer generally starts observing someone without their knowledge in order to extract valuable information from them. You can understand it this way, when you are typing your password then someone is looking over your shoulder and steals that information with their sneaky eyes. This method is very effective in public spaces when you subconsciously enters your details in your device and falls prey to a social engineer.

5

Baiting

Curiosity is not a good thing always, in this case, it may result into infecting your device with an information-stealing and then sending the information to the one who placed the bait for you at the first place. In this method, a social engineer generally drops a USB stick in or around the company and then a normal non-vigilant employer picks it up and sticks into the company’s PC, and this is it the attacker has done what he intended to do.

6

Website Spoofing

In this method, the attacker makes an identical copy of any popular legitimate website and then sends the address to its target, and if he manages to fool the target with his fake website, then his job is done. The target will enter his genuine details that will be sent back to the attacker, and the target’s information is thus compromised. To save yourself from such attacker always look for the website URL that it is written correctly and also it’s HTTPS secured because spoofed website lacks in these features.

7

Phishing

This is an all-time favorite of the social engineers. In this method the attacker generally send emails to their targets posting them as if they are sent by a genuine company or friend and if the attacker is fooled by the email and ends up clicking the link or providing the information asked by the email, the job of the attacker is done, and you have been victimized. So to save yourself from such attackers notice for anything out of the ordinary and proceed cautiously.

Conclusion

Information is useful, and if you not cautious enough in saving it over the internet from the prying eyes of the social engineers, then it may not be long when you find into deep trouble. In this guide, I explained the various types of Social Engineering Attacks and also how you can save yourself from them. Hope this guide will be helpful to the readers.