Friday, February 9, 2007

What is "Social Engineering"?


Social Engineering

Social Engineering is illegal techniques to obtain personal information or companies’ confidential information by tricking people. Using the information, social engineers attack the people and companies’ computer networks, disturb the computer system, and steal the companies’ important information. Social Engineers use various ways to get personal and companies’ information. Among them, pretexting and phishing are the most prevalent ways to deceive people into releasing their information.

Pretexting
Social engineers draw personal and confidential information from the people and companies by phone. Social Engineers often call a target and pretend to be the person’s co-workers, police officers and bankers and ask the target to say their personal information. Also, they often pretend to be private investigators and ask companies to release customers’ information, and then, they steal the customers’ telephone records, utility records, banking records and so on.

Phishing

Phising is done by social engineers through e-mails. Social engineers send fraudulent e-mails that look like legitimate emails from reliable companies such as banks and credit companies. The e-mails ask the targets to send their personal information to verify it. The targets who take the e-mail on trust send back the e-mails with their personal information. In addition to that, in the e-mails, there is a link to a web page. The web page often has famous companies’ logo and information to make it look like a reliable web page. Also, it has a request form that asks personal information; therefore, the targets fill out the request form and send it without noticing that they are deceived.

Besides the pretexing and phishing, there are various ways to obtain personal information illegally. Therefore, we should keep in mind that social engineers aim at our personal information using clever tricks, and we should have responsibility for our information.

Links http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/social_engineering.html

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