social engineering attack and preventiosn

Social Engineering Attack: How You Can Prevent It

Updated: December 2, 2018

Hey, it’s a Monday evening and you’re sitting down with some snacks in a mog,

And now you switch on your device data connection and you got excited to see an old friend of yours sent a friend request.

“Fantastic!” you think finally am not gonna be bored again, cause you have got a lot to discuss with your friend, and after clicking on the notification, your messenger or social network menu comes up and after a few time loading you got a freezing message “session expired”, “session logout”, “please verify your number”, “you have been logged out”.

Then you feel down and got your snacks mog slammed on the floor after some few attempt to log in, you realized your account has been hacked!!!.

The question that runs first into your mind is, How did this hacker manage to hack my account?.

I didn’t login into anywhere nor expose my passwords,

lol man, a social engineering attack has been played on you, anyway don’t panic that’s not the end of life.

So in this article today I will explain deeply to you the following👇👇

How Hackers Make Use Of Social Engineering.
What is SEToolkit and all you need to know about it?
How to keep ourselves safe/remedies from social Engineering attack.

But before we move onto that, let’s briefly explain what social engineering means

What is Social Engineering?

Social Engineering is the act of manipulating people mind/playing on their intelligence so they give confidential information and it relies heavily on human interactions, sees also what Wiki says About Social Engineering.

so now,

How do hackers make use of social engineering?

The fact here is that Hackers can never complete a hacking mission without making use of social Engineering, ask me why??

Now we all know that Facebook hacking is growing widely nowadays, so a hacker is asked to help in hacking a Facebook account, let me tell you the truth.

He/she has no special tool to help hack Facebook Account except if he/she knows about a zero-day attack, a bug that makes him access other users account or ss7 exploits only and it’s rare to see this due to bug bounties are available now on Facebook.

But to Pros is should be easy, ss7 is not a tool available to the mass, See How To Hack Facebook Account Using Ss7 apart from that he has no tool to help you hack the Facebook account, that’s just one hint, so what will he or she do, the hacker will make use of social engineering.

Note:- We are just making use of Facebook social network account as an example.

Here is how many Hackers made a successful hacking mission

They would make some observation on the victim’s account, his profile, his friend list, his uploaded pictures, areas of interest, and this process is called INFORMATION GATHERING
Now the hacker will note your area of interest, and now it’s the approaching time, they will send you a gentle friend request, and after 2 to 3 days, they hook you up with something like “Hey Benson, it’s been long”, what word is like a killing word and now you start up a conversation with them.

After some few days or weeks, after which they grab your trust, the next thing they do is send a phishing link, malicious apps e.g keyloggers, spyware, let’s take for example you are a game lover, you love to play online games.
they will come to you with a game phishing link that will require you to login in your account credentials before you can play the game, lol but to me, I name this method “WE USE THEIR GREED TO GET THEM” but it could still be categorised under phishing attack and keylogging attack.

And you see the victim Is finally hacked, and the hackers get paid.

Also, we have those hackers that get victim account hacked using dictionary attack (Brute Force Attack) this method also requires Social Engineering.

The hacker can just grab your contact details and just call you with a fake number and ask you for some of your details which they will use in creating the password word list to brute force your account but this method is always a 50/50.

See this below image, I hope it explains better.

I hope now you can see that Hackers can’t do without social engineering, so let’s discuss SEToolkit.

What is SEToolkit?

SEToolkit is an open-source penetration testing framework that is developed by David Kennedy (ReL1K) to helps social Engineering attack easy.

For Kali Linux users, SEToolkit is a pre-installed tool but for Android lovers who is using Termux, GNUroot and so on Here is How To Install SET On Your Android terminals

How do we prevent ourselves from social Engineering attack?

You and I know social engineering attack is something you can’t say “hmm, THIS IS A SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACK/PLAN“, even your closest friend might be a social engineer whose aim is to get your credentials details.

That’s all, they ain’t your friends, they will disappear after they lay their hands on what they want.

Here are remedies have been using so far that has been helping out.

Tighten Up your privacy, that’s the first, not all friend requests you see you accept, filter messages you reply too, don’t just trust any messages you see.
Never ever click on links that require you to log in your details, don’t ever click on links that don’t have https://, visit those with https:// only.
Reduce the information you provided about your self on the social network, stop the act of posting your pictures online, you feeding your information to millions of people and you can’t control that.
don’t ever make use of a cheap and guessable password, use a password that will take a hacker more than a year to crack e.g add @#$&+- things like this to your passwords.
And lastly, trust no one.

With these 5 remedies, I guarantee you safety from social Engineering attack, you can still learn more from this visual guide below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7li6_4SiW8

kindly comment and hit the share button if you find this post useful.

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3 COMMENTS

라이브 룰렛 June 8, 2020 At 1:26 pm

Best view you can finde , in this side of world!

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Unknown June 14, 2020 At 10:52 pm

Can I simply say what a comfort to uncover somebody that actually knows what they are discussing over the internet. You certainly know how to bring an issue to light and make it important. More and more people have to look at this and understand this side of the story. I can’t believe you aren’t more popular since you surely have the gift.

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Toney Gassaway July 8, 2020 At 5:03 pm

Good post however I was wondering if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Kudos!

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