What is a social engineering attack?

Social Engineering includes a series of malicious attacks that intercept sensitive information by manipulating the communications between individuals. This kind of attacks usually results from human errors which means an attacker will try to manipulate or trick the victim into sharing confidential information. In other words, attackers try to use psychological manipulation to make victims expose their personal information by themselves. Before that, those attackers would try to gather all the required information about the victim’s background for a successful attack. Further, the victims tend to make mistakes, which leads to their sensitive information leaked. The detailed steps of social engineering attacks as follows:

social engineering_attacks

 

 

 

 

How attackers conduct social engineering attacks?

The attacker will discover and select the victim to get all the relevant background information which will help the culprit to attack by manipulating the sufferer. Then the attacker will try to gain the trust of the victim by making up the imaginary story and try to play with the victim’s intellect. After all these efforts, the attacker will finally implement a relevant method for an attack and gain all the confidential information to hack someone’s or victim’s personal credentials such as personal account information, bank details and so on. The final and equally essential step for an attacker is not to reveal any trace for the victim. It is hard for an attacker to hack any machine or operating system without involving a human (victim or user). This kind of attacks is significantly dangerous due to human error cause risks. It is very difficult to make precaution and identify such attacks in time.

 

Need any help with social engineering attacks?

Written by Julio Del Cid from DelCorp Data. Julio Del Cid can help with social engineering attacks. If you need assistance you can visit our contact page and request a call-back about social engineering attacks.

DelCorp Data is a cybersecurity agency which specializes in software-based attacks and overall cyber protection of your organization. Contact us on 1300 del corp / 1300335267. We are an Australian company based in Melbourne.