Social engineering, when viewed from the lexicon of information as well as communications, is defined as a psychological trick of deceiving or manipulating people into performing certain tasks or with the aim of getting access to personal or confidential information. This trick is usually used for the purpose of extraction of data and knowledge about the targeted users or potential customers.
This term basically originated as a part of societal studies but later on gained popularity as a cyber terminology used to denote frauds that take place over various mediums of communication.
What is Social engineering?
Social engineering is the tactic of luring people and diverting them in a wrong way through conversational skills so that they divulge confidential information about themselves easily. It is a practice commonly followed by normal people as well as hackers who run websites and is done with the intent of spamming users and to improve the rankings of their websites. It is an infamous tactic which is quite prevalent these days. This concept is not limited only to the cyber world, people belonging to different fields often use this procedure to acquire data from their potential customers.
Social engineering, when seen in the cyber world consists of offline conversations and online pop-ups which may usually contain malicious links which redirect the users to fake websites and also attempt to gather vital information belonging to them. To know how to recognize these potentially malicious links, you need to learn the internet security tips!
Forms of social engineering
Social engineering has many different forms such as:
Pretexting
Diversion theft
Tailgating
Baiting and,
Quid Pro Quo
All these activities share the common goal of deceiving users and targeting them for theft of valuable information.
The mechanism behind Social engineering
To conduct social engineering, hackers try to engage users in an offline conversation where they prompt them to reveal sensitive information. In most cases of social engineering, the dishonest person conducting this activity faces the user while the user is surfing the internet and attempting to click on a pop-up ad. There are various procedures. An example of one such event would be asking site visitors for their sensitive information such as passwords, ATM Pin’s as well as other contact and vital details.
The hackers then share this extremely private data among others by selling it to them. Social engineering can often lead to enormous and detrimental financial loss. It also makes people lose access to their bank accounts as well as email IDs.
According to recent data, More than half of the phishing websites of the world are from US based servers. And the countries which are most often targeted for social engineering are India and Russia. It is also a known fact that social engineering is a destructive practice which affects over a million internet users from all over the world.
Staying safe!
To escape this malignant practice, following tips should be necessarily:
1.We must be extremely careful while conversing with unknown people and should not reveal our information easily, at once. We need to undertake a proper assessment of the person and their aim behind communicating with us.
2.We need to exercise caution while viewing links on the web. We must not rely on information supplied to us by unknown or suspicious sources over the internet.
3.We should also necessarily enhance and update the security and antivirus systems installed in our devices periodically.
4.We should not reveal our personal information on pop-up links as these are the most prominent weapons for phishing attackers. Copying web addresses provides in the pop-ups is also a less preferable practice.
5. in case of the online transaction, you should practice special caution. While conducting online transactions, it is a safer practice to check for legit web address.
So, the internet is a place full of potential threats. However you can surely stay safe by exercising awareness and caution while accessing the internet. And how can you do it? By following the recommended cyber security tips.