Social Engineering
Categories: Company Management
You’ve seen it in the movies. Pretty girl pretends she’s going to sleep with some powerful dude, then she gets that passcode she needed to hack into his account. Sucker.
This is the art of social engineering: tricking people in order to gain access to their personal information and accounts.
As encryption gets stronger and stronger...well, people stay the same: fallible as ever. The more difficult it gets to hack into things online, the more attractive social engineering becomes as a way to steal information.
A popular social engineering technique today is spoofing phone numbers, i.e. pretending to be a relative asking for money. For instance, a scammer could spoof your phone number, use it to dial your grandma, and ask her for money, because you have an emergency. There’s also “We’ll give you a refund on this software if you call us back and give us your bank info”-type social engineering scams, and the worst of the worst: fake, long-term, online relationships. Some of those are million-dollar moneymakers, no joke.
Social engineering makes hacking easy again, unfortunately. While things like two-factor authentication help, they don’t help against savvy scammers. So keep an eye out, y’all.
