In the field of computer security, social engineering is the practice of conning people into revealing sensitive data on a computer system, often on the Internet. With the profusion of poorly-secured computers with known security holes connected to the Internet, the majority of security compromises are now done by exploiting such; however, social engineering attacks remain extremely common and are a way to attack systems protected against other methods — for instance, computers which are not connected to the Internet. It is an article of faith amongst experts in the field that "users are the weak link."

A contemporary example of a social engineering attack is the use of e-mail attachments that contain malicious payloads (that, for instance, use the victim's machine to send massive quantities of spam). After earlier malicious e-mails led software vendors to disable automatic execution of attachments, users now have to explicitly activate attachments for this to occur. Many users, however, will blindly click on any attachments they receive, thus allowing the attack to work.

Perhaps the simplest, but still effective attack is tricking a user into thinking one is an administrator and requesting a password for debugging purposes. Users of Internet systems frequently receive messages that request password or credit card information in order to "set up their account" or "reactivate settings" or some other benign operation in what are called phishing attacks. Users of these systems must be warned early and frequently not to divulge sensitive information, passwords or otherwise, to people claiming to be administrators. In reality, administrators of computer systems rarely, if ever, need to know the user's password to perform administrative tasks. However, even this might not be necessary — in an Infosecurity survey, 90% of office workers gave away their password in exchange for a cheap pen.

It is important to note, however, that phishing is not always so direct. One of the biggest problems in Windows computers is spyware (a subcategory of trojan horse), which is malicious software in which the user runs executable code that promises to do something but does other tasks in the background. This typically happens by offering a downloadable program which does a task (Weatherbug, for example), or via the internet by secretly inserting code intended to exploit holes in the user's system security.

Training users about security policies and ensuring that they are followed is the primary defence against social engineering.

One of the most famous social engineers in recent history is Kevin Mitnick.

References

• John Leyden, April 18, 2003. Office workers give away passwords for a cheap pen (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/18/office_workers_give_away_passwords/). The Register. Retrieved 2004-09-09.
• Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon, Steve Wozniak. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security. John Wiley & Sons, 2002. ISBN 0471237124.

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