What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is a technique that hackers use human-to-human interaction to get the user to disclose sensitive information, affecting their computers with malware or opening links to infected sites.

Most of the cyber attacks include some social engineering tricks. The traditional email “phishing” and malware scams. Phishing emails are the attempt to get sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

You can see social engineers everywhere. Maybe your friends sitting next to you focussing on your keyboard while you type your passwords is a social engineer. It’s just that there is no certification for this thing. Social engineering depends on personal nature and emotional feelings, and there are several methods that hackers can use to trick you.

Some Social Engineering Attacks examples:

– A hacker will leave a USB stick that contains a malware in a public place, someone will see that USB stick and plug it into their PC to see what’s on it, and then the device will be infected.

– A hacker designs a website of a known company and sends the link to victims via emails or social media platforms. The victim, totally unfamiliar of the real hacker, ends up compromising personal information and even credit card details.

Security against social engineering begins with education. Users need to be instructed to never click on suspicious links and always secure their log-in credentials, even at the office or at home.