Social Engineering: The Positive Impacts Of Social Security

911 Words4 Pages
Today in society there are many different types of security, but the weakest security is the user. Social engineering is the method of attack on the users themselves. Social engineering can be used to gain vital information to achieve access to a system or a server. Research by GREAVU-ŞERBAN, V., & ŞERBAN, O. (2014) supports that social engineering is an attack that utilizes social skills to compromise, or modify the information and information system of a user. Usually in a social engineering attack the attacker will try to gain the trust of the user to get them to lower their defenses. GREAVU-ŞERBAN, V., & ŞERBAN, O. (2014) research states: Tricks used are multiple, ranging from assuming the identity of another person (most often an employee…show more content…
This has a positive impact on society because it helps prevent compromises within companies and corporations. A compromise in a corporation or a company is dangerous to their customers, and can cause a negative impact for the company. Some social engineering attacks can be utilized via phone with the help of a spoofed phone number, which is having another number show up on the caller ID than your own. This can be used for all sort of tactics in social engineering because you can use thus device to set up fake meetings, in order to gain access to more information about your victims. Some can even get further authorization to preform illegal cyber-attacks to conduct all forms of illegal activities such as causing the denial of service and gaining access to confidential information. Some confidential information would include but not limited to customer list, technical data, and company records as referenced in Social Engineering a General Approach by GREAVU-ŞERBAN, V., & ŞERBAN, O. (2014). (p.…show more content…
The art of persuasion itself is not bad, it can also be used for good as a communication skill. In high school a student learns some skills in persuasion, but this does not necessarily mean that it is social engineering or being a criminal offense. Now if a high school student decided to use their skills of persuasion on a teacher or a member of the administration to get administrative access to the schools grading program; then it would be social engineering and can be classified as a criminal offense. The teacher or administrator did not mean to give the student access intentionally, but they usually do not realize when social engineering can be a large threat. If employers would enforce mandatory training on the threats of social engineering and other threats; they could mitigate some of their security problems. Some of the world’s largest organizations like AT&T and JP Morgan give credit to social engineering for some of their security breaches as referenced in Panning for gold: Automatically analysing online social engineering attack surfaces by Edwards, M., Larson, R., Green, B., Rashid, A., & Baron, A. (2017). Users or employees are the true weakest security for corporations and

More about Social Engineering: The Positive Impacts Of Social Security

Open Document