Cyber Security Discussion 2

  Social engineering attacks

Social engineering attacks involve manipulating or tricking victims to disclose sensitive data in order for the attacker to access and disrupt the network. Not having proper cybersecurity measures could lead to a lot of chaos.

One of the popular social engineering attacks was the Yahoo Security breach which had happened twice in the company’s history. One of them had occurred in 2013 when a lot of confidential information of about 3 billion users had been compromised. It included details such as the names, email addresses of the associated with them, phone numbers, passwords, date of births, etc. It had allowed hackers to get access to any accounts without the use of a password. The information was later put on the dark web which could have been used to carry out more scams.

In order to prevent such malicious attacks from occurring, a few measures can be taken such as-

Personal information shouldn’t be posted online on any social media platform or over-sharing of such information needs to be avoided. Unknown Email links or attachments shouldn’t be opened and security measures need to be implemented in the company in order to protect data and interests of its employees. A good data protection training program needs to be given to make the employees aware of the implications of disclosing such sensitive and confidential data. In order to prevent such cyber-crimes from happening, people need to all the more stay alert and take precautions to keep themselves safe.

References

DOBRAN, B. (2018, September 27). Retrieved from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/famous-social-engineering-attacks

DOBRAN, B. (2019, February 26). Retrieved from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/what-is-spear-phishing-definition-prevention

team, S. t. (2019, August 20). Retrieved from https://securitytrails.com/blog/social-engineering-attacks