You already have the most effective skill that is required for hacking. I am not talking about hacking servers or networks. I am talking about SOCIAL ENGINEERING. Social Engineering refers to hacking the human brain.
Traditional hacking refers to finding security vulnerabilities in systems or applications and trying to exploit them. Whereas in social engineering attacks target the endpoint users of these applications and tricking them to get useful information by becoming a man in the middle.
Social engineering attackers try to exploit the end-users of these technologies. They do this by pretending or claiming to be employees, vendors, or support personnel. They trick the workers by gaining their trust and use that to their advantage. Which then ends up in compromises to data security. Traditional malware detectors or firewalls or any security system won’t help you to stop social engineering attacks.
The following are the hacking skills that everyone has :
Reconnaissance
Recon short for reconnaissance is all about gathering information. For a hacker to get ready for an attack, this is the first step. They try to gather as much information about the target. The target might be a person, a company, or any organization. They do this in preparation to further attack. And actually, there’s nothing illegal with finding the information that is already public. For example, finding public IP addresses or e-mail addresses of employees working in an organization.
The hacking community, calls this recon as OSINT, which means Open Source Intelligence. There are many OSINT tools available. Google is also an OSINT tool. This means an attacker can just google an organization and end up finding a lot of useful information about it which may help in a further attack. And we have a website dedicated to all OSINT frameworks.
Dumpster Diving
Digging in someone’s bin or trash for finding useful information is called dumpster diving. It is a technique used to retrieve information that can be useful to carry out a social engineering attack.
A basic example of dumpster diving is finding someone’s username or password written on a sticky note in found, searching through the trash. To prevent dumpster divers from learning anything valuable from your trash, it is recommended that a company should deploy a disposal policy where all the useful paper which might contain information should be shredded before throwing in the trash.
The hackers will love to know such stuff. For example, e-mail lists, passwords, purchase details, and so on. Some of this information might not seem very harmful to a normal person. But the hacker can use the same information for hacking and getting into networks or systems.
Most of the enterprise companies use a third-party company for this. They hire them to come and shred all the documents and stuff before disposal. Even hardware like old computers and disks that have useful data and may no longer be in use.
Shoulder Surfing
This is the easiest form of social engineering attack. As the name suggests, shoulder surfing is when a person is trying to go through what you are doing. The quickest example of shoulder surfing is when you are trying to login to some website using your username and password. Which then they see it, and now they know your username and password.
Examples of shoulder surfing are endless. The practice of spying on the user of a cash-dispensing machine and gaining pin to their account. And this kind of stuff is happening for a long time.
The things that you can do to protect yourself from this kind of attack is as follows. While putting a password or a pin anywhere make sure you are not in direct line of sight to anyone. Avoid doing any important work in public like giving out information about some company. Because this may result in eavesdropping on some hacker who is already in the environment.
What do we do?
At the surface level, these are not any hardcore technical skills. Not the skills you require technically to hack into any server or system. And anyone can be good at it. And this is kind of the hardest attacks out there to protect from. As a person, as and the company or an organization, no one can easily because you are depending on people. It’s like a human operating system. Not any kind of windows or Linux or Mac OS.
The only thing we can do is to prevent ourselves. This can be done by educating ourselves in the manner a hacker can attack you. And think about the best possible ways you can prevent that from happening. That is all cybersecurity is all about.
If you are a company, educate the employees. Get them to know how the attacks can be done. Don’t put out confidential information about the company in any way.
These are the initial stages where a hacker starts hacking you. If you stop the hackers at this stage, you might end up winning the battle against them. But you fail to, you might be inviting yourselves some further attacks.
