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1. What is social engineering?

A well-designed network can make it almost impossible to directly attack the hardware of a system. But even the most secure network is made vulnerable when it is used by real live people.

People make mistakes; they can be tricked, fooled, bribed, or threatened.

All of these threats to a network are labeled together as 'social attacks' or 'social engineering'.

It is difficult to generalise social attacks because there are so many ways an attacker can convince a user to compromise security either willingly or unwillingly.

What social attacks all have in common, though, is that they target people rather than hardware or software.

 

Social engineering: Manipulating or tricking people so that they give away confidential information

who to trust

 

 

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: What is social engineering