SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND CYBER SECURITY

Abstract As the digital era matures, cyber security evolves and software vulnerabilities diminish, people however, as individuals, are more exposed today than ever before. Presently, one of the most practiced and effective penetration attacks are social rather than technical, so efficient in fact, that these exploits play a crucial role to support the greatest majority of cyber assaults. Social Engineering is the art of exploiting the human flaws to achieve a malicious objective. In the context of information security, practitioners breach defences to access sensitive data preying particularly upon the human tendency towards trust. Cyber criminals induce their victims to break security protocol forfeiting confidential information propitious for a more targeted attack. Disastrously, in many cases, targets are manipulated to involuntarily infect and sabotage the system themselves. This paper examines recurrent social engineering techniques used by attackers, as well as revealing a basic complementary technical methodology to conduct effective exploits. Keywords: Information security, social engineering, cyber security, cyber-attack, hacking, Kali Linux, social engineer toolkit.