In reference to information security, the social engineering attack actually refers to the physiological manipulation of people in such a way that they give up their all divulging confidential information to the attackers. In simpler words it can be understood as a trick which heavily relies on human interaction in which an inauthentic invader/attacker/hijacker often tricks people to break the normal security procedures. And just like any other kind of cyber attack, even the social engineering attacks have thousands of variations.

And among the various ways of social engineering attacks, some of the most common ones are:

• Random e-mail from your relatives or friends – Many times attackers manage to hack someone’s e-mail account and then access their complete contact list to which they can easily send e-mails which might contain a link or an attachment which when opened can hack other’s computers and account also.
• By creating distrust – By creating distrust in your mind for others, the attackers often make an entry as a hero and win your trust and fetch all your private details which they further utilize for malicious reasons.

Perhaps the most common technique attackers use, phishing involves sending hundreds of thousands of email attachments with malware and viruses to hundreds of thousands of people with anticipation that some will click them. Once you click the attachment, you allow attackers to attack your software vulnerabilities, unpatch status security software, break passwords, firewall etc.

It is a software or hardware for capturing content – be it in any form – a user types on the computer, including privileged passwords. This means that when a person is using a keyboard his/her all strokes are recorded in way that the user actually remains unaware of it. Ideally, keystroke logging was developed so as to study the human-computer interaction but later this technique was also used by cyber criminals to steal and invade user’s personal, private data and other sensitive and confidential enterprise data.

Available in various forms, the broadest categories of keystroke logger are:

• Hardware based key logger
• A Key logging software program

As the name itself explains, in this technique a hijacker/attacker actually crack users account passwords so as to make invasions without user’s permission. Being a process of computer security and cryptanalysis, this technique is generally used to recover the forgotten passwords from the data that has been already stored in computer systems or networks. This technique might use various measures or processes but the most popularly used technique is of guessing the passwords repeatedly by using computer algorithms which help you to make numerous combinations until you successfully retrieve the right password.

This means looking for memory on desktops, finding out credentials which might be valuable in the form of plain text or in Windows environment etc. Memory scrapping is thus all about finding out a user’s history of activity to find trail of guesses or hints that lead to personal information.

This refers to a sheet where a user might intentionally keep his or her password with an objective to easily access the information in case the information is forgotten. This is still used by people which can prove disastrous if it gets in the hands of a hacker. So, it is always recommended that you never store your passwords in such file.

Tricking a user into clicking on another source while the user intended to click elsewhere

Now these are just some of the many ways an attacker can stoop to steal your information. It is a matter of concern for literally any type of company to understand that changing password and developing sophisticated password rules will not solve any problems. Rather, this only adds just a fragment of security.

In order to fully protect your personal details and information, you need learn a few important things; some of which necessarily include –

Always use a professional and paid antivirus with lots of advanced features. It will protect you from a range of threats and make sure to enable auto download of updates so that whenever a virus is detected in the cyber scape, your antivirus automatically gets immune to that.

Never use keyboard to type password on internet banking sites. Rather, use the virtual keyboard which automatically changes its key placement and thereby protect your information such as keystrokes from being hacked.

Do not store any important business and financial information on your computer. Although it sounds a little impossible task, experts often recommend storing important data on a flash drive and keeping it safe. You can always store important information on a physical file.

Do not click on any email attachments unless you are sure about the sender since doing it might install virus on your computer.