Social Engineering Techniques

In this article we will look at what is social engineering in cyber security and different social engineering techniques.

What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is a technique to influence or deceive people to obtain the information or perform some action. People are the weak link in security and this principle makes social engineering possible. A social engineer generally uses a mobile or Internet to make people do something that is illegal. Social engineering is an art of exploiting the trust of people.

There are two main categories of social engineering:

Human-based social engineering

Refers to person-to-person interaction to get the desired information. Examples include:

• Impersonating an employee or valid user
• Posing as an important user
• Using a third person
• Calling as technical support
• Shoulder surfing
• Dumpster diving

Computer-based social engineering

Refers to an attempt to get the desired information using computer or software. Examples include:

• Fake e-mails (phishing)
• E-mail attachments
• Pop-up windows

Suryateja Pericherla

Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.

He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.

He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.