Saturday, April 17, 2010

Social Engineering

Wikipedia.org describes Social engineering as the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques. The term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access. Mostly, the would-be attacker does not make himself known to their victims and many victims are left in dire situation without a guess.
Basically, Social Engineering involves use of trickery to sneak through security setups by attempting to gain access  to network or computer systems through someone authorized to access the network in order to get  information that compromises the network's or system’s security. It takes advantage of the victim’s desperate situation by capitalizing on their helplessness which may eventually lead to revealing their login and other valuable credentials. Security of login or other useful information is not seriously regarded as something that should not be tampered with or shared  by anyone apart from the user himself. This is so because a lot of computer users still live in the dark as to know the importance of data protection. A good number of users just turn a blind eye to this concern and stay without taking any action to protect themselves from would-be social engineers. It is also advisable that you should not allow anyone come near you or look over your shoulder when inputting security information as this may lead to someone stealing the required information by simply memorizing any valuable access credentials (i.e. passcodes).
Though online threats continue to wreck havoc all over the world, proper ways should be put in place on how computer users in our institutions should respond to such threats. A coordinated effort by System Administrators and their employees will yield better results if they join hands in this fight.  This should be an on-going process as new threats continue to emerge and social engineers continue to get more sophisticated by each day that passes by.
Reference: Wikipedia.org

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