Basics of Social Engineering

In a nutshell, social engineering is the art of manipulation and deception. The term social engineering refers to a vast range of different malicious activities where the main goal is to use psychological manipulation and other forms of human interaction to fool individuals into handing over information that would not otherwise be accessible to the attacker.

Criminals often select social engineering as their preferred method of attack as it is generally one of the easier methods but also one of the most rewarding, this is because exploiting peoples human nature into distributing passwords etc is straightforward compared to hacking or cracking their passwords.

In the field of cybersecurity, the social engineering attack is often overlooked. In all aspects of security, the human is the critical vulnerability that malicious attackers can exploit without difficulty. Therefore, cybersecurity experts are desperately trying to secure the human element in order to safeguard businesses and individuals worldwide.

It is believed one of the best methods to prevent social engineering attacks is education. Educating individuals has proven to be one of the most successful mitigation tactics used to prevent social engineering that is why we want to research and experiment how true this claim is.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused many unprecedented challenges since its outbreak. One of these being the shift from classroom learning to online learning (e-learning). Due to this shift, a large majority of students make use of computer technology daily to carry out their studies. For instance, students may have to carry out online lessons, communicate using emails, access their educational institution's website, converse with fellow students across social media platforms, download new software and so forth. For this reason, it is more important than ever that the necessary actions are taken to keep students and their online data protected from malicious attackers

If you wish to learn more about online threats and cyber crime consider visiting https://www.getsafeonline.org/ a government funded program who also work closely with law enforcement agencies and other bodies in support of their outreach activity, internal awareness and customer online safety. Get Safe Online is a public / private sector partnership supported by leading organisations in banking, retail, internet security and other sectors.

Why do criminals often select social engineering as their preferred method of attack?

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