Social Engineering
Social engineering is a hacker's most powerful weapon. It was used to pull off the most sensational break-ins and to spread the most notorious viruses. Recall the Anna Kurnikova virus, which spread when users received a letter in their mailbox with an attachment purporting to be a picture of Anna in her birthday suit. This application of social engineering was taking advantage of human weakness. I believe that the excessive curiosity of the male share, which is the larger one, of the Internet users who opened the attachment and infected their computers helped the virus spread.
Hackers are exceptionally good at finding weak spots in people and pressing them to acquire the necessary information. One area in which social engineering is used is in obtaining credit card numbers and other information with the help of believable email messages. A user receives a letter asking him for the account password because, for example, the bank's database malfunctioned. What do you think, although they had been explicitly warned by the bank's personnel to never reveal a password to anyone, quite a few users do?
Thanks to the exposure given to the issue by the media, Internet users are becoming more cautious with mail from unknown sources. It's becoming more difficult to convince someone to reveal a password in response to a letter purporting to be from the support service. Hackers, however, are not resting on their laurels and are constantly in search of new methods for exploiting human weaknesses.
Date: 2010-02-14
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