Social Engineering Phishing Attacks Paper
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Added on 2020-04-15
Social Engineering Phishing Attacks Paper
Added on 2020-04-15
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Running head: SOCIAL ENGINEERING: PHISHING FOR A SOLUTIONSOCIAL ENGINEERING: PHISHING FOR A SOLUTIONName of the StudentName of the UniversityAuthor’s NoteABSTRACTThis research paper discusses vulnerabilities involved insocial engineering phishing attacks. Phishing attack hasbeen critically discussed in the paper. The use of trends inphishing attacks has been provided in the paper. Factsrelated to phishing attacks have been included in the paper.Preventive measures regarding threats and risks of phishingattacks have been explained in the report. This paper dealswith several solutions to phishing attack to minimize itsvulnerabilities. Keywords: Social Engineering, Phishing attacks andDNS cache poisoningINTRODUCTIONSocial Engineering describes non-technicalintrusion for relying upon and manipulating people fordivulging into confidential information and performingillegal activities. The effectiveness of social engineering ishigh as it contains low risks activity by in directing anattack on human loved ones. These tactics allow a socialengineer for avoiding suspicion [1]. However, this paperwill focus on Phishing attack. Phishing is a form ofdeception by which social engineer makes an attempt foracquiring sensitive information from the potential victim ofillegal activities. Phishing started with attacking America Online(AOL) users, which has become a common problem in thecurrent cyber world. Social engineering has been occurringover the Internet after its existence [2]. Hackers stealpersonal and private data of users by different methods.The unawareness of keeping personal information of a useris the weak point for phishing. Various countries aresuffering from cyber-attacks over the internet. According toIBM’s X-Force researchers, the number of spam emails hasbeen increasing rapidly. The number of emails containingmalicious malware is also increasing over the time [3]. Figure 1: Phishing attacks all over world(Source: Karthika and Perumal, 2016, pp.31)
1SOCIAL ENGINEERING: PHISHING FOR A SOLUTIONFigure 2: Email including malicious malware(Source: Ahn et al. 2016, pp. 2403)The number of phishing reports has been 40,621in August 2009 that has surpassed 38,514 by September2007 [4]. The phishing attack has caused financial loss of$3.2 billion to the government.This research will deal with assessingvulnerabilities of end users related to phishing based socialengineering attacks. The trends in phishing attacks will bediscussed in this paper. The factors responsible for phishingattacks will be provided here. A proper previous literaturewill be reviewed in this paper. This paper will use an onlinesurvey-based research focusing on email aspect ofphishing. A proper analysis of collected data will beanalyzed during the research. The future recommendationwill be provided for mitigating issues related to phishingattacks and further research will be done in future.Research AimThe aim of the research is to assess the vulnerabilities ofend users in relation to phishing based social engineeringattacks.Research ObjectivesThe research objectives are discussed below:To identify vulnerabilities in cyber world relatedto phishing social engineering attacksTo critically analyze impact of phishing attack onend usersTo identify strategies for mitigating phishingsocial engineering attacksTo recommend strategies for future work andtrends in cybersecurityResearch questionsThe research questions are mentioned below:What are the vulnerabilities in a cyber worldrelated to phishing social engineering attacks?What is impact of the phishing attack on endusers?What are strategies for mitigating phishing socialengineering attacks?What are recommended strategies required forfuture work and trends in cybersecurity?LITERATURE REVIEWPhishing is a type of social engineering in whichan attacker tries to fraudulently track data and informationof users over the internet. The use of spam emails and otherspam images are used for initiating phishing attacks. Acomplete phishing attack contain three phases includingsending a large number of spam emails that direct users tofake websites, collectors set up fake websites that trackprivate information of users and cashers extracts financialdata and information and misuse it. Figure 3: Phishing information flow(Source: Ahmed et al. 2017, pp.189))Banks, financial institutions, social media usersand gaming sites users are a focus of phishers. Hackers aretargeting these users for getting her private informationalong with bank account number for payment [5]. This has
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