Reference no: EM132307693

Question: Social engineering attacks are one of the most common attacks faced by the IT industries. From past decade information technology have revolutionized tremendously, which even has increased the social engineering attacks in the same way. To demonstrate what social engineering attack means, it an art to lure common people to share their personal information such as name, age, home address and other financial information (Mironela, 2017). There are many psychological factors such as greed, fear, curiosity and sympathy that may help the hackers to attract common people to share their information.

Phishing is one of the attacks where hackers tries to send emails or messages that can psychologically target the common people by creating sense of urgency, fear or greedy. These emails and messages look almost legitimate and lures the people by sharing their information online, user may even click on the fake links which may download some malicious attachments and installs harmful malware on the user systems. Recently, there are many hacker campaigns that sends phishing emails that disguises Starbucks company is offering gift cards worth $200 for free by signing up and sharing with 5 other people. Many people have fallen for these tricks and shared their personal and credit card information to these fraudulent sites.

These kinds of attacks can limit by following few preventive measures. Users need to check emails or messages for spellings or grammatical errors, the links may have falsified URLs of top brands. Users need to be more careful while downloading any attachments, unless you know what you are looking for. If a user has noticed such attack, he can report to the respective email providers like Google, they can mark such emails as spam, and redirect such emails to junk mails.

Will these preventive measures will suffice the phishing attacks or do emails providers need to come up with highly intelligent service that can filter such emails completely?

References: Mironela Pîrnau. (2017). Considerations on Preventing Social Engineering over the Internet. Memoirs of the Scientific Sections of the Romanian Academy, 85.