Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Chapter Three: Social engineering
3.1
 
Preamble 
Social engineering is an attack technique that has gained popularity due to a continued 
streak of hugely successful attacks that it has been used to orchestrate. This hacking 
technique is quite unique in that it targets the weakest link cyber security, the human (Lior, 
2005). Systems, networks, and devices enjoy the luxury of being protected from hacking 
through a wide variety of ever-evolving cyber security products. There is no product that can 
reliably protect a human from social engineering attacks other than the human itself 
(Bamberger, & Mulligan, 2010). The current level of advancement and sophistication in 
security products has been discouraging attackers from directly attacking systems. The old 
tricks in the book, such as brute force, are fast becoming ineffective against many systems. 
This is forcing them to look at the other avenues of compromising organizational systems and 
stealing information and money. Human users have become the most promising targets and, 
thus, many attackers are turning to social engineering to either effect their attacks or get 
information to attack systems.
Social engineers have the advantage in these attacks in that they can carefully study 
their targets, determine their weaknesses, and then exploit them by means of phone calls, 
emails, or short chats (Tan, 2012). Technological revolutions have also made it easier to 
attack today’s users. The proliferation of social media platforms encouraging users to put out 
information about themselves has made information gathering about targets to be simpler for 
social engineers (Mital & Sarkar, 2011). This chapter will discuss the entirety of a social 
engineering attack. Social engineering presents a real-view of the privacy issues surrounding 
social media. Because users have not been careful when dishing out their private information 

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on these media, it is out there and easily accessible by attackers. The following sections will 
discuss more about the attack.