Security News > 2020 > May > Social engineering: A cheat sheet for business professionals
SEE: Social engineering: A cheat sheet for business professionals.
Security consulting firm Social Engineer, Inc., defines social engineering in incredibly basic and broad terms: "Any act that influences a person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interest."
Real-life examples of successful social engineering attacks abound, and we can go well into history to find examples of actual social engineering tricks, like those perpetuated by Victor Lustig, who posed as a French official and successfully sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap-multiple times.
A quick Google search will net you dozens of stories about successful social engineering attacks, and with good reason: An estimated 98% of cyberattacks are launched using social engineering, making it far more of a threat than direct exploit targeting by hackers.
Lots of social engineering attacks rely on knowing something about the intended target, and where better to gather that information than on social media?