Holding a security door open for someone laden with cups of coffee or a big stack of documents may seem the polite thing to do. But you may have fallen for a classic trick deployed by hackers.
The person might have been smartly dressed and looked legitimate, but that is a key part of the deception of “social engineering”, which uses simple, everyday situations to deceive individuals into giving out physicial or technical access to facilities that can be a mine of valuable information.
Whether getting into a building, eliciting a password over the telephone or persuading a phishing victim to e-mail their banking details, “social engineering” is responsible for more than half of security breaches, and some estimates claim the proportion is as high as 90 per cent.Read Full Story