Social Engineering: Hacking into Humans

Abstract

In this world of digitalization, the need for data privacy and data security is quite important. The IT companies today prefer their data over everything. Not only for companies, the data privacy important for any individual. But no matter how secure is the company, how advanced is the technology used or how much up to date their software is, there's still a vulnerability in every sector known as ‘Human'. The art of gathering sensitive information from a human being is known as Social Engineering. Technology has increased drastically in the past few years but the threat of Social engineering is still a problem. Social engineering attacks are ince=reasing day by day due to lack of awareness and knowledge. Social engineering is a really common practice to gather information and sensitive data through the use of mobile numbers, emails, SMS or direct approach. Social engineering can be really useful for the attacker if done in a proper manner.'Kevin Mitnik' is the most renowned social engineers of all time. In this paper, we are going to discuss Social Engineering, its types, how it affects us and how to prevent these attacks. Also, many proofs of Concepts are also presented in this paper.

Keywords: Phishing, Baiting, Watering hole, Spear Phishing, SEToolkit, Pre-texting