Social Engineer Media: Its Role In Society

About media

Today, media is playing a major role in most of the fields. It is an intervening agency or instrument which works as an intermediater to provide or gain information.
There are many types of media such as mass media, news media, advertising media and social engineering media. Let's have a look at this type of media-

Social engineering media is the one kind of security attacks in which the social engineer manipulates a particular person to reveal secured information to steal data, access computer or cellular phones, cash and even your own identity. This kind of security attacks might be simple or complex. However the intension of these hackers is to gather the required information using the social engineering techniques.

Social engineers

The social engineers who want to gather information would contact the victims over the mobile phone or through websites they are visiting often. We could also say it is an illegal acquisition of sensitive information or improper access privileges by an unknown person by establishing legitimacy in the mind of the target.
It is an act of psychological manipulation introduced by hacker-turned-consultant Kevin-mintick. It is simple form of fraud applies to trickery or cheating for the purpose of gathering confidential information from others.

Usually the social engineers would use the techniques which are associated with social engineering which are based on particular attributes of human decision making. There are various combinations of attack techniques. Some of them are pre-texting, diversion theft, phishing, IVR or phone phishing, baiting etc. Other types of common tricksters or fraudsters are also considered as Social engineers.

Tricks and techniques

Nowadays the popular techniques include spoofing or hacking ID's of the people using famous e-mail IDs such as Gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc. This kind of hacking is frequently happening all over the world to find out credit card account numbers and their passwords, online banking Id's etc. They would also hack private emails and chat histories and edit them to extort money and creating distrust among individuals.

Media related to Social engineering kills on qualities of human nature. The truly successful social engineers would get any information from people without the sign of raising suspicion as to what they are doing. It is the hardest form of security attack to protect against because it cannot be protected with hardware or software since they are directly contacting the people for confidential information...

Categories

So for successful defence we need to make the public aware about this and should ensure that they to follow it strictly. SE is based upon two categories such as human-based and computer-based.

In human-based hacking, a person would interact with another person directly through mobile or emails to get some confidential information. However in computer-based, there will be human interaction but not directly. They will create a software in such a way in which it would retrieve the desired information from the target with or with out their knowledge.

In some cases, the SE's would produce virus and Trojans and send through an email to get the information. So it is always advisable to be aware and cautious about these social engineers or cheaters to avoid such bad occurrences.