Social engineering is a method of psychological influence with elements of manipulation used by dishonest people to make others commit rash acts in the financial sphere or disclose confidential information.
Types of social engineering are also often observed in modern technologies. It affects data breaches - the largest threat in cybersecurity. This type of fraud affects not only individuals but also large organizations or corporations.
Social Engineering and Internet Scammers
If a scammer chooses a major target, they prepare social engineering, i.e., an attack. In order to properly influence the investor's mind, scammers first study the target for a long time. They obtain initial data and look for loopholes in cybersecurity.
Internet scammers often pretend to be non-existent individuals to gain the trust of a potential future victim, thus allowing them to disclose their information and provide access to internal systems.
Types of manipulations by scammers using social engineering are carried out in the form of attacks that are divided into several categories:
- phishing;
- smishing;
- vishing;
- CEO fraud;
- fake antivirus;
- fraud schemes on dating sites.
Methods of Social Engineering Online
Social engineering spreads over the Internet in the most popular way of deception – phishing, with special attacks affecting the victim via email. Emails are sent with malicious links that, when clicked, can reveal your data. These links can also infect devices with malicious programs that mimic real ones. These sites and programs are designed to steal personal data and allow scammers to use it. Fraudsters often use malicious SMS messages, similarly sending malicious links that affect the security of information. A common method of social engineering is schemes spread by phone.
To protect yourself from the influence of social engineering, you need to adopt security measures. One such method is cleaning your digital footprints. This means that when using the Internet, digital footprints are inevitably left behind. They can be active or passive.
Passive footprints are information about websites that are visited and keep visitor data in the background, such as browsing histories, purchase histories, or cookie files
An active digital footprint, on the other hand, is the data that a person consciously types on the Internet. These can be posts, comments, messages on social networks. The fewer data left on the Internet, the harder it is for a scammer to carry out an attack using social engineering methods.
One wants to know, how to protect against social engineering, the answer is simple – clean your digital footprint.
There are several ways to clean your digital footprint:
- - delete information from search engine sites,
- - prevent uncontrolled dissemination of information on social networks,
- - profile privacy ensures security,
- - avoid scattering accounts that are used only once.
Manipulations of Scammers on the Internet
Cybersecurity plays a significant role in our lives, it is recommended to study the basic protection methods. They include using reliable personal password-protected data, such as different ones for each account. Additionally, avoid public Wi-Fi. Also, do not forget about constant updates of programs, antiviruses, and hardware. Backups created on the cloud or a communication device can help protect against the effects of social engineering.
Social Engineering: How Not to Become a Victim
To avoid becoming a victim of social engineering, certain safety measures should be taken:
- - regular security training;
- - multi-factor authentication;
- - reliable verified licensed cybersecurity software.
Also, do not forget about access control policies and cybersecurity technologies and use spam-filtering programs. It would not hurt to install programs that recognize emails used for phishing, avoid using macros in documents, and try not to answer emails that seem suspicious.
There are many types of scammer manipulations, each year they become more inventive and sophisticated, new programs and schemes appear that require more time for the average user to master.
Security and attentiveness are the main methods of protection against social engineering on the Internet.