A New Approach to Reducing Social Engineering Impact

Abstract

In recent years, the security research community has been very active in proposing different techniques and algorithms to face the proliferating security vulnerabilities. However, social engineering remains an alarming threat to the most secured networks. Security administrators are certainly aware of the gravity of the human factor, whatever is the strength of the technological measures. The human factor is still a difficult-to-surround notion and a difficult to quantify concept. It is rarely considered in the early stages of the development lifecycle of software, assuming traditional security considerations have been taken into account. In this chapter, we discuss the added-value of context as a way to deal with social engineering. Based on a case study describing a typical attack, we provide a first attempt to model this parameter.