Social Engineering is the technique performed by the threat actors who have the intention to exploit human weakness. The involvement of various techniques which involve the manipulation of human psychology.
The Threat actor especially used the social engineering methods to gain sensitive information from the victims. The Social Engineering attacks always depend on the trust factor which can gain from the victim’s side which can never suspect in giving out his/her personal information such as phone numbers, passwords, social security numbers, etc.
This method and technique have always proved to be effective when it comes to compromising the entire network of an organization. The cyber threat actor can disguise himself as the IT audit team member or an external network administrator and that can easily obtain the access inside the building without any suspicious.
When they get access to the entire organization then it follows various and other social engineering techniques to compromise the whole network.
If an organization is under threat of attack that means the whole organization has no good facility of IT security administrator. The lack of knowledge in cybersecurity gives them great advantage for hackers to perform attacks and cause the data breach in the organization.
Type of Social Engineering Attack.
You found many of the social engineering attacks that can be used by the threat actor. Some of them are :
- Spoofing
- Phishing
- Vishing
- Tailgating
- Baiting
- Spoofing: A form of attack where,” what we see will look it, but it is not”.When you define this term then you come to know how this works. Spoofing is nothing but disguising as a legitimate source in order to gain sensitive information that can gain access to something. The attacker always plays tricks to believe us that you are accessing the original source by spoofing.
- Phishing: The most simple and effective attack a hacker can use to steal credentials like username, password, social security number, organization secrets, or credit card details. Sometimes the phishing is mainly used to spread malware inside a network. The phishing involves social engineering and Spoofing.
- Vishing: It is similar to the phishing that involves calling the victims and pretending as a legitimate caller.When the victim believes that without suspicion they can easily gain access to sensitive information like network structure, employee details, company account details, etc.
- Tailgating: A technique that is used by the threat actors that can enter an organization building. During the cyberattack, the threat actors can wait for an employee/ person to enter inside where the access for the outsiders which can restrict and follow them from inside the building once they use their access cards or access key to open the door.
- Baiting: In this process, the threat actor can create baits such as USB flash drives, CD-ROMs, Floppy disk, or card readers. Basically they create a folder inside the devices such as projects, revised payrolls of the organization, and drop them in sensitive areas ( Rest Rooms, Elevators, Cafeterias, and parking lots) they found the place where employees move a lot.
Once the employee picks the USB and insert it in the PC, the script inside the device runs
and gave full control to the hackers. This method of social engineering is called Baiting.
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