Social engineering is not new. Con artists and grifters have used social engineering since time immemorial to get victims to act against their better judgment and part with their money or divulge private information. Thanks to the Internet, however, criminals have access to a whole new world of potential targets.
The advance-fee scam is a great example of how an old social engineering ploy can evolve with the times and use technological advancements to horrible effect. The scam has its origins in the late 18th century Letters from Jerusalem con. For a modest sum, the prisoner offers to provide a map revealing the location of the treasure.
According to a contemporary account from one of the scammers, 20 percent of recipients responded to the letters. The success of the Jerusalem scam gave rise to a 19th century variant known as the Spanish Prisoner scam, named after the supposed European nobleman at the center of the scam.
The Spanish Prisoner scam improves upon the Jerusalem scam in two major ways. With these changes the story became less about personal enrichment or outright greed and more about compassion, appealing to a different and potentially broader group of victims. The advance-fee scam continued to evolve through the late 20th century. With the rise of the Internet, advance fee scammers were no longer limited by the cost of a stamp or the number of letters they could write in a day.
The Internet allows them to copy and paste a prewritten message and spam thousands of potential targets with a few simple clicks. The modern version of Letters from Jerusalem, commonly referred to as the Nigerian Prince or scam once again involves a mysterious stranger, vast sums of money, and an offer too good to be true. In the first phase of the scam, the victim receives an email from someone claiming to be a foreign prince, government official, deposed leader, lawyer, banker, etc.
Accordingly, the sender needs the victim to act as a money mule; that is, receive a wire transfer of the money then wire the money back to the sender while keeping a large percentage of the total as a service fee. The sender may send follow up emails with official looking documents to help substantiate their claims.
In phase two, the scammer introduces an obstacle. To be fair, not all advance-fee scams originate in Nigeria , though many do. Countries like Nigeria are just foreign enough to mystify westerners.
While one might second guess an email claiming to be from a member of the British royal family, maybe Nigeria has a ton of itinerant princes wandering around looking for random American pensioners to help them unlock their trust funds.
Who knows? Certainly not the victim. As it stands, advance-fee scams remain a time-tested, profitable, and low-tech option for enterprising cybercriminals. In each example, social engineering scammers are looking for the right target and the right emotional trigger. Sometimes the combination of target and trigger can be hyper-specific as with a spear phishing attack. Other times, scammers may go after a much broader group.
The sextortion scam. In this first example, scammers are casting a wide net. The target? Anyone who watches porn. The victim is notified via email that their web cam has supposedly been hacked and used to record them watching adult videos. Ask any security professional and they will tell you that the weakest link in the security chain is the human who accepts a person or scenario at face value.
Contain a download of pictures, music, movie, document, etc. If you download—which you are likely to do since you think it is from your friend—you become infected.
Now, the criminal has access to your machine, email account, social network accounts and contacts, and the attack spreads to everyone you know. And on, and on. Phishing attacks are a subset of social engineering strategy that imitate a trusted source and concoct a seemingly logical scenario for handing over login credentials or other sensitive personal data.
Urgently ask for your help. They need you to send money so they can get home and they tell you how to send the money to the criminal. Use phishing attempts with a legitimate-seeming background. Typically, a phisher sends an e-mail, IM, comment, or text message that appears to come from a legitimate, popular company, bank, school, or institution.
Ask you to donate to their charitable fundraiser, or some other cause. Likely with instructions on how to send the money to the criminal. Preying on kindness and generosity, these phishers ask for aid or support for whatever disaster, political campaign, or charity is momentarily top-of-mind. Present a problem that requires you to "verify" your information by clicking on the displayed link and providing information in their form.
The link location may look very legitimate with all the right logos, and content in fact, the criminals may have copied the exact format and content of the legitimate site. Because everything looks legitimate, you trust the email and the phony site and provide whatever information the crook is asking for.
Pose as a boss or coworker. It may ask for an update on an important, proprietary project your company is currently working on, for payment information pertaining to a company credit card, or some other inquiry masquerading as day-to-day business. These social engineering schemes know that if you dangle something people want, many people will take the bait. These schemes are often found on Peer-to-Peer sites offering a download of something like a hot new movie, or music.
This Attack Vector utilizes the Arduin-based device to program the device. This attack vector will auto generate the code needed in order to deploy the payload on the system for you. This attack vector will create the. The attack vectors range from Powershell based downloaders, wscript attacks, and other methods. You can spoof the SMS source.
You can use a predefined template, create your own template or specify an arbitrary message. The main method for this would be to convince a user to click on a link in their browser and steal credentials or perform other attack vectors.
You can send SMS to a single number or import a file that has a list of all numbers that it will send the SMS to them.
The Wireless Attack module will create a fake access point leveraging your wireless card and redirect all DNS queries to you.
SET will create a wireless access point, dhcp server, and spoof DNS to redirect traffic to the attacker machine. These attacks will allow you to use PowerShell which is available by default in all operating systems Windows Vista and above.
PowerShell provides a fruitful landscape for deploying payloads and performing functions that do not get triggered by preventative technologies. Now the attacker should coax the victim to run the code that located in the exported file or write a batch file to be easier for convincing his victim to run it.
Social engineering toolkit is a powerful tool that allows the penetration tester to use against his victims to convince his victims to provide him with the required information for further attack.
A new tab for your requested boot camp pricing will open in 5 seconds. If it doesn't open, click here. Ahmed Elhady Mohamed is a researcher at InfoSec Institute and an information security professional and author. He focuses mainly in the areas of exploitation,reverse engineering and web security.
The email looks legitimate. It includes the Sharepoint logo and branding familiar to many office workers. Phishing attacks increasingly aim to exploit remote collaboration software— Microsoft research suggests nearly half of IT professionals cited the need for new collaboration tools as a major security vulnerability during the shift to working from home. Perhaps the most successful social engineering attack of all time was conducted against Belgian bank Crelan.
Cybercriminals frequently try to harpoon these big targets because they have easy access to funds. Nearly everyone gets the occasional text message that looks like it could be a potential scam.
But in September , one smishing SMS phishing attack became so widespread that the Texas Attorney-General put out a press release warning residents about it. After following the link, the target was asked to provide personal information and credit card details. The Texas Attorney-General warned all Texans not to follow the link. He stated that delivery companies do not communicate with customers in this way, and urged anyone receiving the text message to report it to the Office of the Attorney General or the Federal Trade Commission.
Top tip: Never to respond to any suspicious message, click links within SMS messages, or reveal personal or company information via SMS. To learn more about how Tessian can protect your people and data against social engineering attacks on email, book a demo today.
Our Approach. To prevent threats, your security controls must understand human behavior. View Tessian's integrations, compatibility, certifications and partnerships. Reduce security threats posed by employees with a unified view of human layer risk. Find out why we created this new category nearly two years ago. Solutions By Use-Case and Industry. Human Layer Security Platform. Automatically prevent data exfiltration over email with Tessian Enforcer.
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