In this article we will look at what is social engineering in cyber security and different social engineering techniques.
This article is a part of our cyber security tutorial for beginners.
Contents
What is Social Engineering?
Social engineering is a technique to influence or deceive people to obtain the information or perform some action. People are the weak link in security and this principle makes social engineering possible. A social engineer generally uses a mobile or Internet to make people do something that is illegal. Social engineering is an art of exploiting the trust of people.
There are two main categories of social engineering:
- Human-based social engineering
- Computer-based social engineering
Refers to person-to-person interaction to get the desired information. Examples include:
- Impersonating an employee or valid user
- Posing as an important user
- Using a third person
- Calling as technical support
- Shoulder surfing
- Dumpster diving
Refers to an attempt to get the desired information using computer or software. Examples include:
- Fake e-mails (phishing)
- E-mail attachments
- Pop-up windows
Next let’s learn about Cyberstalking.
Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.
He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.
He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.
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