Social Engineering

808 Words2 Pages

Social engineering is a non-technical form of intrusion that uses deception to gain your trust and trick you into providing personal information that you usually would not give out freely. (Rouse, 2006). Social engineering is one of the biggest techniques used in identity theft. Computer technology has radically changed the world and how society communicate with each other. When computer technology was in its infancy, business companies were the only member of society that had to be concerned about social engineering attacks. With the arrival of mobile and personal computing for nearly everyone, securing personal data has become an issue for everyone, not just business organizations. If you’re personal information is not protected, the consequences can be catastrophic. Today, there are spammers, hackers, virus developers, and identity thieves that poses a real risk to your privacy and even more importantly, your finances. (Williams & Sawyer, 2013).
Social engineering practioners are using a variety of methods to retrieve your data; they can use the phone, the internet, or even show up in person to install malicious software. Additionally, if you visit an unscrupulous website, or even access unauthorized locations your information could be retrieved (Heimeri, 2014). Criminals will often take weeks and months researching a company before hacking into it. Often they will employ the “dumpster diving” technique, where they search through a company’s or individual’s trash looking for sensitive information, like bank statements and pre-approved credit cards applications. In order to prevent hackers from finding this material, everyone should shred all documents containing personal information. The hackers will check the compa...

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...you could down load a maliciousness virus that will provide them your sensitive information (Williams & Sawyer, 2013). It is critical to have firewalls in place to minimize social engineering on your personnel or companies network systems. But the first line of defense, in protecting your company against the loss of critical business information is to ensure that your employees are trained in security awareness (Goodchild, 2012). Hacker can still gain access to your systems even if you have the best security controls in place. It starts with your employees, you have to increase their awareness of how social engineering operates. If they know the signs, they will be able to prevent it. The most important thing is when you are on your personal or work computer, always remember PPI because you will never know who is on the other side of the computer networks.

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