Social Engineering Attacks A Reconnaissance Synthesis Analysis
Maha Rita Arabia-Obedoza, Gloria Martín Rodríguez, Amber Johnston, Fatima Salahdine, Naima Kaabouch
Abstract
Social Engineering outweighs any other security threats as it has proven to be one of the easiest, cheapest, and most potent and highly successful ways for criminals to achieve their ends. We have witness how globally governments, organizations and institutions down to every individual have embraced the state-of-the-art technological advances and interconnectedness brought about by networks and telecommunications. We all together experience the ease and comfort of these modern living; however, many malicious actors also identified these technological vehicles as a means to selfishly benefit themselves. Cybercriminals have found humans to be an easy prey to victimize and fall for their intent. Hence, we have presented the significance of mitigating this type of attack in order to give precaution on the danger of what social engineering can ensue. Following the quote of Sun Tzu "Know Your Enemy", the initial step to plan and perform for an effective defense strategy is similar to the military operations, which is to do a reconnaissance Synthesis analysis using the rapid synthesis approaches to systematically identify the primary studies and have followed an orderly series of steps in order to accomplish our exploration. Applying the same technique, we have investigated the current existing social engineering attacks and countermeasures and performed a distillation of some selected studies regarding attacks in social engineering.