social engineering

Cyber Threat: What is "Social Engineering"?

Insight Provided by NortonLifeLock

Most cybercriminals are master manipulators, but that doesn’t mean they’re all manipulators of technology — some cybercriminals favor the art of human manipulation.

In other words, they favor social engineering, meaning exploiting human errors and behaviors to conduct a cyberattack. For a simple social engineering example, this could occur in the event a cybercriminal impersonates an IT professional and requests your login information to patch up a security flaw on your device. If you provide the information, you’ve just handed a malicious individual the keys to your account and they didn’t even have to go to the trouble of hacking your email or computer to do it.

As with most cyber threats, social engineering can come in many forms and they’re ever-evolving. Here, we’re overviewing what social engineering looks like today, attack types to know, and red flags to watch for so you don’t become a victim.

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