1 Gaceta Digital FI • No. 2 • Febrero 2013 - Facultad de Ingeniería

21 Gaceta Digital FI • No. 2 • Febrero 2013
The British Club
What is social engineering?
Omar Rangel
The social engineering can be defined as the art of
people based on cheating and social skills
to get personal or confidential information.
People who carried out this activity used in their favor
the human weaknesses to get their purposes; examples of
human vulnerabilities are credulity, innocence, ambition,
ignorance, confidence and
The social engineering can exist in a personal or enterprise
level, using the information obtained to provide benefits
to the , performing fraud´s that may have economic
or prestige consequences.
Among the social engineering techniques used today are
Phishing, Smishing and Pharming.
The Phishing technique is based on sending a huge
quantity of emails, which request us to update or revalidate
our personal information including passwords in
different accounts like the ones used in an email address
or in a bank accounts. By clicking on the link that they
sent, this link redirects us to a fake website that looks
like the original but it is not. We can provide all our
information without knowing that it is a farce.
Smishing consist in sending text messages in a massive
way to mobile phone users pretending to be a company
which provides a service, requesting data like credit card
numbers. One of the messages can illustrate this technique
is the next: “We confirm that you have registered for
a
. You be will charged $2 by day unless
you cancel your registration. For this, please send your
credit card number.”
Pharming looks like Phishing, because both of them are
techniques based on a website supplantation in order
to perform a fraud; but unlike phishing, the Pharming
technique consist in executing a in the computer,
so that the attacker can chose the website where the
victim will be redirected. This malware must be installed
on the computer to attack, which can be done in different
ways, infecting by USB or abusing of the curiosity and
innocence of the victim; the most popular is to receive an
email whit false news or fake prize in the ,
among other topics that arouse the curiosity of the victim,