Social Engineering is a field that keeps growing day by day
Social Engineering Attack comes with psychological manipulation to deceive People to the point of them releasing their confidential data’s.
They exploit the weaknesses which are in every one of us, like fear, hope, love and greed.
I term this as “Use Their Greed To Get Them“. i.e Social Engineers will make uses of what you love to get what they want, that’s it.
7 Ways To Protect Your Self From Social Engineering attack
- Reduce Your Curiosity Rate
- Delete Requests Of Personal Information Or Password
- Secure your device[PC or Mobile Phone]
- Avoid Clicking Suspicious Links and Sites
- Resist Baiting Techniques
- Reduce Your Curiosity Rate
- Reduce Your Curiosity Rate
#1 Reduce Your Curiosity Rate
Remember that curiosity killed the cat,I know it’s human nature to be curious, but nevertheless, you should always watch out for every action you take, e.g
(a) inserting unknown USB or cords into your device or computer.
(b) inserting directly of disk delivered to you from unknown sources e.t.c. are things you should be careful with.
#2 Delete Requests Of Personal Information Or Password.
No one should be contacting to you for your personal details or password be it through your email, via a phone call, it’s a scam, even if you are chatting with friends and strangers if it gets to the point of releasing details, trust no one, social Engineers are smart and tricky.
They can attack you even with your closest friends or family i.e They attack your closest family or friends, then take over their social media accounts or emails and use it to run their attack on you making their victims two.
#3 Secure your device[PC or Mobile Phone].
Do you know what, keep your device safe, install firewalls, email filters, SMS filters, and antivirus software, I will recommend using of Next Generation Antivirus e.g Vipre Antivirus, For Secure, Private Call & SMS, I will recommend using Hushed and for email filters, you can use BlueMail.
#4 Avoid Clicking Suspicious Links and Sites.
You have just received an email and it says you should visit a website to do this and that if you find this link suspicious then I will advise you not to click or visit it, because the website you are about to visit might be embedded with some JavaScript which when you click them, it gives the attacker control over your browser or Computer.
Apart from that, you can also make use of URL REAVEALER to uncover the destination of URLs that is the original URL of a particular link sent to you from unknown Sources of from friends who you don’t trust.
#5 Resist Baiting Techniques.
Have you ever encountered this situation when you want to download software and you are asked to log in your credentials in exchange for a download, you’ve seen baiting in action?
Be highly cautious with requests for surrendering credentials, These types of social engineering attacks have been used to spread viruses and break into corporate data systems.
#6 Identify Scareware Techniques.
This type of social engineering attack plays on human fear, For example, a user sees an alert message of his or her device is been infected with a malware or virus, then they will provide a software (antivirus) for you to install protect your device, where the app itself is the harmful software.
#7 Beware of the Quid Quo Pro
Social engineers can and will either request your help with information or offer to help you i.e posing as IT supports. If you did not request any assistance from the sender, consider any requests or offers a scam.
Do your own research about the sender before committing to sending them anything.
For more hints and better understanding on How to avoid Social Engineering Attacks check out the below guides from Google help
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