Research Article
Open access
Published on 7 October 2023
Download pdf
Potthas,C.;Berry,P.;Al-Naimi,H. (2023). Social engineering. Advances in Engineering Innovation,2,21-24.
Export citation

Social engineering

Christine Potthas *,1, Patrick Berry 2, Hamad Al-Naimi 3
  • 1 Saint Leo University
  • 2 Saint Leo University
  • 3 Saint Leo University

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

https://doi.org/10.54254/2977-3903/2/2023016

Abstract

The realm of cybersecurity is replete with challenges, not least among them being the art of social engineering. This form of attack leverages human tendencies such as trust, leading to potential breaches. Though more covert than brute force or technical hacks, social engineering can be insidiously effective. Within this exposition, we probe various manifestations of social engineering: from phishing to pretexting, baiting to tailgating, and the subtle act of shoulder surfing, concluding with mitigation strategies.

Keywords

cybersecurity, social engineering, phishing, pretexting, baiting, tailgating

[1]. Hadnagy, C. (2010). Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking. Wiley.

[2]. Mitnick, K. D., & Simon, W. L. (2002). The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security. Wiley.

[3]. Whitman, M. E., & Mattord, H. J. (2011). Principles of Information Security. Cengage Learning.

[4]. Anderson, R., & Moore, T. (2006). The economics of information security. Science, 314(5799), 610-613.[5] Jagatic, T. N., Johnson, N. A., Jakobsson, M., & Menczer, F. (2007). Social phishing. Communications of the ACM, 50(10), 94-100.

[5]. Workman, M. (2008). Wisecrackers: A theory-grounded investigation of phishing and pretext social engineering threats to information security. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(4), 662-674.

[6]. Pfleeger, S. L., & Caputo, D. D. (2012). Leveraging behavioral science to mitigate cybersecurity risk. Computers & Security, 31(4), 597-611.

[7]. Dodge Jr, R. C., Carver, C., & Ferguson, A. J. (2007). Phishing for user security awareness. Computers & Security, 26(1), 73-80.

[8]. Alseadoon, I., Chan, T., & Foo, E. (2012). Who is more susceptible to phishing emails? A Saudi Arabian study. Information Management & Computer Security.

[9]. Stajano, F., & Wilson, P. (2011). Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security. Communications of the ACM, 54(3), 70-75.

[10]. Parsons, K., Calic, D., Pattinson, M., Butavicius, M., McCormac, A., & Zwaans, T. (2017). The human aspects of information security questionnaire (HAIS-Q): Two further validation studies. Computers & Security, 66, 40-51.

[11]. Dhamija, R., Tygar, J. D., & Hearst, M. (2006). Why phishing works. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems.

[12]. Heartfield, R., & Loukas, G. (2016). A taxonomy of attacks and a survey of defence mechanisms for semantic social engineering attacks. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 48(3), 1-39.

[13]. Finn, P., & Jakobsson, M. (2007). Designing ethical phishing experiments: A study of (ROT13) rOnl query features. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

[14]. Florencio, D., & Herley, C. (2006). A large-scale study of web password habits. Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web.

Cite this article

Potthas,C.;Berry,P.;Al-Naimi,H. (2023). Social engineering. Advances in Engineering Innovation,2,21-24.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Disclaimer/Publisher's Note

The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

About volume

Journal:Advances in Engineering Innovation

Volume number: Vol.2
ISSN:2977-3903(Print) / 2977-3911(Online)

© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open access policy for details).