The Threats of Social Engineering

Social engineering has become a serious problem for businesses in the last few years, and as it has grown a new form of hacker has evolved – a hacker with little technical knowledge, but a lot of charisma and the ability to influence people.

First; what is social engineering? It’s when an attacker uses people rather than programs or exploits to gain access to your personal data or private systems. An attack may not even involve you – the hacker using publicly available information combined with persuasion techniques to gain access to your data without ever interacting with you.

For this reason, social engineering is difficult to protect against. Even with long passwords, secure accounts, and strong locks, your data can be stolen out from under you.

Let’s take a look at some surprisingly effective social engineering techniques, and then we’ll look at how you can protect yourself against them.