Examples of social engineering attacks
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 9:33 am
Psychological manipulation techniques are those used to carry out an attack on the victim, phone calls, instant messaging, social networks, email, etc. There are many and varied techniques, and as technology advances, cybercriminals improve these techniques in such a way that the victim often does not realize that they are being manipulated, in this way they can steal our identity and act in our name, but that is not all. Below we present some of the names of the most common engineering attacks.
1. Spam attack
Spam in our email is the oldest social engineering technique. Every day, when we open our email manager, instead of receiving an expected email we see a huge amount of unwanted emails, which at first are quite annoying and at best, make us waste time deleting them. But the truth is that the vast majority of these emails are intended to get us to perform an action on them, click on a link, download an attachment, etc. and in this way they can inject malware into us.
2. Phishing Attack
This is the simplest form of cyber attack, but also the most dangerous and effective. It imitates or impersonates the identity of a person or organization, making it easier for us to click on turkey phone data a link, among other things. There can be several types of these attacks and they can reach us via email, by phone (vishing), or via SMS text message (smishing). We must differentiate here between phishing and spear phishing: the former is not personalized (the criminals attack a large number of people randomly) and the latter are smaller attacks targeted individually (to a person or a small group of people, a specific company).
3. Pretexting Attack
This type of attack is possibly the most difficult to detect, as attackers pretend to be someone else, both on the Internet and social networks, and outside of them. Cybercriminals spy on and investigate the victim in order to create a story or pretext that is credible enough to fool them.
4. Quid pro quo attacks
Quid pro quo means "something for something." In the cybersecurity field, this is another type of engineering attack: attackers offer something (for example, discounts or gifts) to victims in exchange for certain information or sensitive data . It can be a discount, a gift, or a consideration. In addition, they often set a time limit for this "exchange," which creates a sense of urgency in the victim, making wrong decisions and giving in to what the attacker asks for in order to obtain their reward immediately.
1. Spam attack
Spam in our email is the oldest social engineering technique. Every day, when we open our email manager, instead of receiving an expected email we see a huge amount of unwanted emails, which at first are quite annoying and at best, make us waste time deleting them. But the truth is that the vast majority of these emails are intended to get us to perform an action on them, click on a link, download an attachment, etc. and in this way they can inject malware into us.
2. Phishing Attack
This is the simplest form of cyber attack, but also the most dangerous and effective. It imitates or impersonates the identity of a person or organization, making it easier for us to click on turkey phone data a link, among other things. There can be several types of these attacks and they can reach us via email, by phone (vishing), or via SMS text message (smishing). We must differentiate here between phishing and spear phishing: the former is not personalized (the criminals attack a large number of people randomly) and the latter are smaller attacks targeted individually (to a person or a small group of people, a specific company).
3. Pretexting Attack
This type of attack is possibly the most difficult to detect, as attackers pretend to be someone else, both on the Internet and social networks, and outside of them. Cybercriminals spy on and investigate the victim in order to create a story or pretext that is credible enough to fool them.
4. Quid pro quo attacks
Quid pro quo means "something for something." In the cybersecurity field, this is another type of engineering attack: attackers offer something (for example, discounts or gifts) to victims in exchange for certain information or sensitive data . It can be a discount, a gift, or a consideration. In addition, they often set a time limit for this "exchange," which creates a sense of urgency in the victim, making wrong decisions and giving in to what the attacker asks for in order to obtain their reward immediately.