University Report: Social Engineering Attacks and Awareness

This report delves into the realm of social engineering attacks, emphasizing the psychological manipulation tactics employed to compromise confidential data. It explores common methods like phishing and spear phishing, detailing how attackers exploit human behavior to gain access to sensitive information. The report highlights a real-world example, the Carbanak attack, illustrating how spear phishing can infiltrate an entire workstation and compromise financial systems. It underscores the importance of user awareness, the implementation of security software, and the need for up-to-date systems to combat these threats. Furthermore, the report references key resources on user authentication, access control, and physical security, providing a comprehensive overview of cybersecurity measures to prevent social engineering attacks.

Running head: - SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACKS AND ITS AWARENESS
SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACKS AND ITS AWARENESS
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1SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACKS AND ITS AWARENESS
Social engineering attack requires the involvement of the psychological manipulation
and different method of fooling which is applied to the users or the employees who deal with
the storage of confidential data (Beckers & Pape, 2016). Social engineering involves using a
certain method of tricks that invokes fear and urgency in the victim, and the victim prompts
personal data. The social engineering attacks involve human activities. Due to the
involvement of human activities preventing such an attack is difficult. Phishing is one of the
most common types of social engineering attacks. There are two types of phishing which are
commonly known as phishing and spear phishing. Phishing changes with ongoing events and
disasters.
Social engineering attack is common and mostly executed with the help of phishing.
One of the social engineering attacks with the help of spear phishing was observed by
Carbanak (Krombholz et al., 2015). Emails were sent to all the employees which indirectly
infected the entire work station. The hackers with the help of the email were able to enter the
system of the bank from where all cash transfers and all bank related operations were
performed. The attack happens with a code in the email which infected the entire system.
After entering the system, the hackers were able to transfer all the information about the
working process of the organization.
To prevent certain attacks, there are certain things that the bank could have installed
to prevent such attacks. People need to be aware of the social engineering attacks and their
methods. Software and application need to be used by the organisation to defence the attacks.
With the use of Cyphort organisation can easily detect the attacks and can have a clear idea
about the attack (Kumar, Chaudhary & Kumar, 2015). Software like AppRiver helps in
preventing spam and is used to filter the virus emails, which helps the hackers in attacking
the systems.

2SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACKS AND ITS AWARENESS
The users associated with the bank need to be aware of all the spams. The user should
trust no one and not reveal any personal information. The user should avoid posting personal
information related data on social media websites (Jansson & von Solms 2013). The user
should not click on any link from an unknown source. The user needs to install proper
antivirus and software to avoid social engineering attacks. The systems need to be updated.
The user requires proper knowledge about such attacks.

3SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACKS AND ITS AWARENESS
References
Beckers, K., & Pape, S. (2016, September). A serious game for eliciting social engineering
security requirements. In 2016 IEEE 24th International Requirements Engineering
Conference (RE) (pp. 16-25). IEEE.
Jansson, K., & von Solms, R. (2013). Phishing for phishing awareness. Behaviour &
information technology, 32(6), 584-593.
Krombholz, K., Hobel, H., Huber, M., & Weippl, E. (2015). Advanced social engineering
attacks. Journal of Information Security and applications, 22, 113-122.
Kumar, A., Chaudhary, M., & Kumar, N. (2015). Social engineering threats and awareness: a
survey. European Journal of Advances in Engineering and Technology, 2(11), 15-19.