George V. Hulme and Joan Goodchild collected in one article the foundations of social engineering. Social engineering is essentially the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques. Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick helped popularize the term ‘social engineering’ in the ’90s, although the idea and many of the techniques have been around as long as there have been scam artists of any sort.
George V. Hulme and Joan Goodchild talk about the company’s risks, give detailed examples of social engineering. The same article highlights the best ways to protect against social engineering. Also, nearly all of the experts interviewed agreed that training, and supporting, the staff in their ability to question interactions when the situation doesn’t feel right, and support them in that ability, will go far in lowering social engineering risk.
In conclusion, we would like to note that the best defense against social engineering attacks is user education and layers of technological defenses to better detect and respond to attacks.
