Abstract
This paper presents the concept of social engineering. The internet has completely changed the mode of operations of modern-day systems. There are billions of internet users and this number is rising every day. Hence, ensuring the security is very important for any cyber physical systems. This paper focuses on one of the very important aspects of cyber security, i.e., social engineering. It is defined as a set of techniques of human manipulation by exploitation of the basic emotions of human beings. Different institutions deploy state-of-the-art systems to protect the data housed in their datacenter. However, it is also essential that an individual must secure their personal information from the social engineers. Hence, this paper discusses the data privacy issues and various relevant techniques under the umbrella of social engineering. It discusses various social engineering techniques and summarizes those techniques, thus concluding the paper.
TopIntroduction
One of greatest invention in the history of humankind that single handedly changed the way of doing things is Internet. Internet does not only change the ways of communication, business but also how individuals interact with each other. Long gone are the days when an individual has to wait for hearing back from a person, he wrote a letter to. Now even business and individual get their payments instantly and even keep track of their fleets and cargo and all thanks goes to the internet for making our life easy. Researchers argues that all the Social Media platforms controls user’s behavior to some extent by notifies them about different occasion and users’ response to it as per Social Media platform’s expectations. For instance, Facebook notifies about friends’ birthdays and LinkedIn offers alters regarding work anniversary of connections (Haenschen, Frischmann, & Ellenbogen, 2021). According to internetlivestats.com the global internet users are more than 5 billion as of November 2021 and it keeps growing (internetlivestats, 2021). Merely the active internet users as of January 2021 are 4.3 billion as per the numbers of Statista as shown in the Figure 1 (Statista, 2021).The researcher (Li, Yu, Susilo, Hong, & Guizani, 2021) argues that the number of devices connected with the 5G cellular network only will be 50 billion by the year 2025. Let alone 5G mobile subscriptions worldwide are expected to rise from 0.6 from billion in 2021 to 3.4 billion in the year 2026 as per Statista (Statista, 2021). More user and more devices connected to the internet means creation of more data and more potential incidents of data breach and data theft.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Phishing: Sending email to someone, pretending as reputable company, alluring him to disclose their personal information such as their keys, password or other personal information
Social engineering: The use of deception to let someone disclose their personal/ confidential information that may be used later for malicious intent
Cybersecurity: The practice of defending network, devices, data and infrastructure from malicious users ensuring the security objectives such as confidentiality, integrity, privacy and non-repudiation
Baiting: Alluring someone to click on a link to get free products or money, asking to provide personal information and then use the information for malicious activity
Holiday Scam: A type of scam generally proliferate on holiday with lucrative deals, most of the mare never delivered or executed, and victims looses their money
Eavesdropping: The practice of passively listening to someone’s conversation such as via wiretapping
Scam: A dishonest scheme or ploy to gain some one’s information or money via deceptive means