1 What is Social Engineering?
Social Engineering is a technique of psychological manipulation of computer users to gain their sensitive information in order to get unauthorized access to their computer system.
The social engineering attack can be accomplished through human interactions and by manipulating them to break into the security procedures.
Attackers present themselves as a trusted party and true identity or official source of information to perform a social engineering attack on people.
Nowadays, Social engineering attackers mostly target Cryptocurrency users because most of the crypto users are new and have a lack of knowledge or much greediness help the hackers to trick them easily.
2 Social Engineering Techniques
Phishing
Phishing is a type of hacking technique used by attackers to collect the sensitive information of someone like passwords, private keys, credit card details and so on.
Baiting
It is the most commonly used type of social networking technique where attackers offer free services and in order to access these services, the users had to provide their personal information.
In cryptocurrency world this attack is very common where many websites offer free mining, earning free bitcoins from faucets and airdrops from new projects.
Scareware
It is a type of malware used to scare users by showing unexisting bugs or errors where it tricks users to install fraudulent software to prevent their computer system.
Normally, It popup message like “Virus found, click here to remove it”.
Pretexting
In this type of social engineering, the one party lies to another in order to get the access of their personal data where scammer party claims that they need their financial related personal data to verify their identities.
3 Social Engineering Prevention
- Multi-Factor Authentication: You can use 2FA authentication which increases the security level of your account and hackers will be unable to access your account data even after social engineering attack success.
- Don’t download spam email attachments and do not click on the unknown links or banner popup messages.
- Keep your Anti-malware and Anti-virus updated to the latest version, also keep updated your operating system and applications.
- Do not share your personal information or financial data like private keys of your bitcoin wallet, passwords to anyone claiming themselves a legitimate member of the company help or customer’s support.
- Educate and prepare yourself against the social engineering attacks existing today and research a little bit more on security and safety precautions.
