Social Engineering Attack Strategies and Defence Approaches
Open accessAbstract
This paper examines the role and value of information security awareness efforts in defending against social engineering attacks. It categories the different social engineering threats and tactics used in targeting employees and the approaches to defend against such attacks. While we review these techniques, we attempt to develop a thorough understanding of human security threats, with a suitable balance between structured improvements to defend human weaknesses, and efficiently focused security training and awareness building. Finally, the paper shows that a multi-layered shield can mitigate various security risks and minimize the damage to systems and data.
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Pretexting attacks are based on pretexts that make the victim believe and trust the attacker.
“They are based on pretexts that make the victim believe and trust the attacker [27].”
From Social Engineering Attacks: A Survey (2019) · cites this paper as [27]
The sections on Liking and Similarity and Natural Inclination to Help describe attackers building trust or impersonating someone to obtain access or information. The copy does not identify these tactics as pretexting or state that pretexting attacks specifically work this way (searched: pretexting, pretexts). (LLM, conf=0.78)
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Social engineering attack examples, templates and scenarios
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Social Engineering Attacks: A Survey
Salahdine, F., & Kaabouch, N. (2019) · Future Internet · doi:10.3390/fi11040089 · Cited by 509 · see citing works
“, lottery.”
- Authors
- Ghafir, I., Prenosil, V., Alhejailan, A., & Hammoudeh, M.
- Affiliations
- Manchester Metropolitan University (GB)
- Venue
- 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2016-08
- Pages
- 145-149
- OpenAlex
- W2526787500
- Cited by
- 76
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 6.51
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- e-space.mmu.ac.uk
- Locations
- International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud) (publishedVersion)
- e-space (Manchester Metropolitan University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information and Cyber Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › User Authentication and Security Systems
- Keywords
- social engineering attacks, information security awareness, employee security training, offensive strategy, human weakness, security risk mitigation
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