Social engineering definition

What is social engineering?

The social engineering or sociotechnic is term for humans factor, usually in computer security. People are weakest part of security. Social engineering usually mean deception and manipulation people to get secret informations. More methods are based on psychology or somone from humans bad habits. Typical are phishing emails, fake identity, fake loogins ets.

Is Social Engineering big risk?

Social engineering is very dangerous for goverment or company, becouse usually attacs are not bewray and geted information can be very important for industrial espionage,competition or safety. This term define Kevin Mitnick, who affect in USA and use social engineering for getting infromations from big companies as example SUN. He showed that is not imporant wich security measure you have, when you can be attact by manipulation with your employees.

Typical examples of social engineering

Typical examples of social engineering are phishing emails or pharming sites. This social engineering methods are more most same as when someone call you and present self as admin and ask you for your password.

Social engineering in politic

The social engineering term is also used in politics, when politic manipule with people by psychology, typicaly before votes.

Social engineering definition from wikipedia.org

Social engineering is a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access and in most (but not all) cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim