Social Engineering Article Review

Malware and phishing are two types of cyber security problems that are a growing problem in the United States and other countries. By utilizing various methods cyber criminals attempt to gain access to corporate networks for the purposes of obtaining source code or other sensitive corporate information. Not only are corporations involved but the average user can also be a target of these malicious attacks. Criminals continue to refine their methods with new ways to attract visitors to malicious sites. There are many types of antivirus and malware products available but none of them can fully protect your computer or a corporate network. It takes diligence to ensure the privacy of the information on your computer. While the antivirus and other software is necessary to try and avoid most problems it doesn’t completely solve the problem of those threats.
One such way that your system can be compromised is when hackers break into a legitimate site and replace the links in the site with links to malicious sites. So for instance, you may be reading a legitimate newspaper website that has been hacked and one of the links to a news article could point you to a site that attempts to download a virus or malware to your PC. Since you trusted the site and didn’t know the link was malicious there’s really no good way to catch such a problem.
There are other types of malware that are very easy to catch and there are a few methods one should employ in order to protect your private information. First, any email that contains links should be considered suspicious. Many emails are junk emails which are unsolicited attempts to gain control of your computer or your personal information. All email should be highly scrutinized before opening any attachments or links. If you are going to open a link in an email make sure you completely trust the sender of the document.
A new style of attack is a social engineering attack in which criminals attempt to gain some basic knowledge about you via a social networking site and then obtain other pertinent information about you from your friends by providing leading questions. Another example of a cyber-attack on social media is the use of sending links along with a tweet in order to get the user to utilize the link. In many cases the link attempts to install malicious software on the user’s PC. While there will always be threats it’s important to utilize good Antivirus software along with a common sense approach that it takes diligence to keep your private information private.