Social engineering is the tactic of manipulating, influencing, or deceiving a victim in order to gain control over a computer system, or to steal personal and financial information. It uses psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or giving away sensitive information
Jul 31, 2018 social engineering – GW Information Security Blog Social Engineering involves gaining the trust of unsuspecting users via manipulation or trickery, in order to gain unauthorized system access, credentials, or commit fraud. Attackers will attempt to take advantage of a multitude of psychological traits such as carelessness, curiosity, empathy, complacency, and most frequently ignorance. The Twitter hack shows a major cybersecurity vulnerability Jul 21, 2020 Why this ‘Pandemic’ Is Looking More Like a Social
May 13, 2020
Recognizing Social Engineering: 11 Tips to Identify an Attack Jun 17, 2020 social engineering - Glossary | CSRC
This social engineering definition can be further expanded by knowing exactly how it works. How Does Social Engineering Work? Most social engineering attacks rely on actual communication between attackers and victims. The attacker tends to motivate the user into compromising themselves, rather than using brute force methods to breach your data.
Social engineering can also take the form of the "engineer" requesting the wire transfer of monies to what the victim believes is a financial institution or person, with whom the victim has a business relationship, only to later learn that such monies have landed in the account of the "engineer." Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker.