Social Engineering

Since the target of Social Engineering is a person, the success of this sort of attack highly depends on the human factors. Specifically, several truths about people increase the chances for a successful Social Engineering attack:

• Human beings are helpful by nature and want to help out people in distress or in difficult situations.
• Human beings, by instinct, trust others.
• Human beings tend to obey the orders of their superiors or persons with authority in their organization.
• Human beings by nature are afraid of consequences of not having followed the rules/orders of the company, particularly of losing their jobs.

Pages 309 - 312 of the Nayak & Rao textbook include several scenarios exepmplifying attacks that take advantage of each of the above traits.

Policies, awareness, and trainings are the only major means of ensuring that the people are not easily conned through social engineering attacks.