Social Engineering Attacks: A Survey
---
paper_title: Social engineering and digital technologies for the security of the social capital' development

paper_content:

Social capital is transformed due to the digitalized environment built with the ICT expansion. The evolution of the social capital' forming and development reflects the new forms and models of communication, the extended possibilities of choice and of presence into the Web as a unique space of exchange. This article presents the theoretical approach to the analysis of behavior' regulation within the framework of social technologies implemented to the digital space. Social engineering represents an important factor of the violation of information security' rules, the IT-specialists attribute the majority of the crime in the sector to the insiders of private business companies and to the imprudence of individuals. The social capital can play the both positive and negative roles to assure information security issues, the social engineering can be in the contradiction with the tendencies of the social capital development, but the social technologies used are based on the social capital development.
---
paper_title: Security Evaluation of Wireless Network Access Points

paper_content:

Abstract The paper focuses on the real-world usage of IEEE 802.11 wireless network encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) function. A brief history on the development of encryption methods and WPS is given. Wireless scanning of 802.11 networks in a capital city has been performed, and the results of it have been analysed. To ascertain the knowledge about the security of wireless networks of the average user, an online survey has been conducted. To test the security of encryption methods and WPS function, practical attacks against private test wireless networks have been made. The authors conclude that the safest way to set up 802.11 network with a pre-shared key is to use Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) encryption without support for WPS function. Statistics in Riga shows that networks are often configured otherwise and thus vulnerable to attacks. Survey results prove that respondents are not well informed regarding the security of wireless networks.
---
paper_title: Trust and Social Engineering in Human Robot Interaction: Will a Robot Make You Disclose Sensitive Information, Conform to Its Recommendations or Gamble?

paper_content:

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was designed to emulate a social engineering attack. At first, iCub attempted to collect the kind of personal information usually gathered by social engineers by asking a series of private questions. Then, the robot tried to develop trust and rapport with participants by offering reliable clues during a treasure hunt game. At the end of the treasure hunt, the robot tried to exploit the gained trust in order to make participants gamble the money they won. The results show that people tend to build rapport with and trust toward the robot, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive information, conformation to its suggestions and gambling.
---
paper_title: CANDY: A Social Engineering Attack to Leak Information from Infotainment System

paper_content:

The introduction of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) systems into vehicles make them more prone to cyber-security attacks that may impact of vehicles capability and, consequently, on the safety of drivers, passengers. In this paper, we focus on how to exploit security vulnerabilities affecting user-to-vehicle and intra- vehicle communications to hack the infotainment system to retrieve information about both vehicle and driver. Indeed, we designed and developed CANDY, a set of malicious APP injecting in a genuine Android APP, acting as a Trojan-horse on the Android In-Vehicle infotainment system. It opens a back-door that allows an attacker to remotely access to the infotainment system. We use this back-door to hit the privacy of the driver by recording her voice and collect information circulating on the CAN bus about the vehicle. CANDY is distributed by using social engineering techniques.
---
paper_title: Social engineering as an attack vector for ransomware

paper_content:

Constant ransomware attacks achieve to evade multiple security perimeters, because its strategy is based on the exploitation of users-the weakest link in the security chain-getting high levels of effectiveness. In this paper, an in-depth analysis of the anatomy of the ransomware is develop, and how they combine technology with manipulation, through social engineering, to meet their goals and compromise thousands of computers. Finally, simulations of the phases that it follows are carried out, leaving the necessary guidelines to evaluate the security of the information, and thus, generate policies that minimize the risks of loss of information.
---
paper_title: Social Engineering Toolkit — A systematic approach to social engineering

paper_content:

Social engineering techniques, exploiting humans as information systems' security weakest link, are mostly the initial attack vectors within larger intrusions and information system compromises. In order to practically evaluate the risks of information leakage trough the target organizations' employees, when performing a penetration test, an ethical hacker must consider social engineering as a very important aspect of the performed test. Social Engineering Toolkit (SET) is an integrated set of tools designed specifically to perform advanced attacks against the human element, and is the most advanced, if not the only toolkit of such kind that is publicly available as open source software. Incorporating many social engineering attack vectors, it heavily depends on Metasploit, an integrated penetration testing framework. This paper gives a brief introduction to the Social Engineering Toolkit software architecture, and provides an overview of supported attack vectors.
---
paper_title: Social engineering and digital technologies for the security of the social capital' development

paper_content:

Social capital is transformed due to the digitalized environment built with the ICT expansion. The evolution of the social capital' forming and development reflects the new forms and models of communication, the extended possibilities of choice and of presence into the Web as a unique space of exchange. This article presents the theoretical approach to the analysis of behavior' regulation within the framework of social technologies implemented to the digital space. Social engineering represents an important factor of the violation of information security' rules, the IT-specialists attribute the majority of the crime in the sector to the insiders of private business companies and to the imprudence of individuals. The social capital can play the both positive and negative roles to assure information security issues, the social engineering can be in the contradiction with the tendencies of the social capital development, but the social technologies used are based on the social capital development.
---
paper_title: Security Analytics: Big Data Analytics for cybersecurity: A review of trends, techniques and tools

paper_content:

The rapid growth of the Internet has brought with it an exponential increase in the type and frequency of cyber attacks. Many well-known cybersecurity solutions are in place to counteract these attacks. However, the generation of Big Data over computer networks is rapidly rendering these traditional solutions obsolete. To cater for this problem, corporate research is now focusing on Security Analytics, i.e., the application of Big Data Analytics techniques to cybersecurity. Analytics can assist network managers particularly in the monitoring and surveillance of real-time network streams and real-time detection of both malicious and suspicious (outlying) patterns. Such a behavior is envisioned to encompass and enhance all traditional security techniques. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of Security Analytics, i.e., its description, technology, trends, and tools. It hence aims to convince the reader of the imminent application of analytics as an unparalleled cybersecurity solution in the near future.
---
paper_title: Security Evaluation of Wireless Network Access Points

paper_content:

Abstract The paper focuses on the real-world usage of IEEE 802.11 wireless network encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) function. A brief history on the development of encryption methods and WPS is given. Wireless scanning of 802.11 networks in a capital city has been performed, and the results of it have been analysed. To ascertain the knowledge about the security of wireless networks of the average user, an online survey has been conducted. To test the security of encryption methods and WPS function, practical attacks against private test wireless networks have been made. The authors conclude that the safest way to set up 802.11 network with a pre-shared key is to use Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) encryption without support for WPS function. Statistics in Riga shows that networks are often configured otherwise and thus vulnerable to attacks. Survey results prove that respondents are not well informed regarding the security of wireless networks.
---
paper_title: On tackling social engineering web phishing attacks utilizing software defined networks (SDN) approach

paper_content:

Web phishing attacks are one of the challenging security threats. Phishing depends on humans’ behavior but not protocols and devices vulnerabilities. In this work, software defined networking (SDN) will be tailored to tackle phishing attacks. In SDN, network devices forward received packets to a central point ‘controller’ that makes decision on behalf of them. This approach allows more control and management over network devices and protocol. In this work, we propose a neural network based phishing prevention algorithm (PPA) that is implemented utilizing Ryu, an open source, SDN controller. The PPA algorithm has been tested in a home network that is constructed with HP2920-24G switch. Moreover, a phished version of Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail login pages have been written and hosted on three different free hosting domains. PPA has detected all of the phished versions and allowed the access to real version of these services.
---
paper_title: Trust and Social Engineering in Human Robot Interaction: Will a Robot Make You Disclose Sensitive Information, Conform to Its Recommendations or Gamble?

paper_content:

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was designed to emulate a social engineering attack. At first, iCub attempted to collect the kind of personal information usually gathered by social engineers by asking a series of private questions. Then, the robot tried to develop trust and rapport with participants by offering reliable clues during a treasure hunt game. At the end of the treasure hunt, the robot tried to exploit the gained trust in order to make participants gamble the money they won. The results show that people tend to build rapport with and trust toward the robot, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive information, conformation to its suggestions and gambling.
---
paper_title: A Serious Game for Eliciting Social Engineering Security Requirements

paper_content:

Social engineering is the acquisition of informationabout computer systems by methods that deeply include non-technical means. While technical security of most critical systemsis high, the systems remain vulnerable to attacks from socialengineers. Social engineering is a technique that: (i) does notrequire any (advanced) technical tools, (ii) can be used by anyone,(iii) is cheap. Traditional security requirements elicitation approaches oftenfocus on vulnerabilities in network or software systems. Fewapproaches even consider the exploitation of humans via socialengineering and none of them elicits personal behaviours of indi-vidual employees. While the amount of social engineering attacksand the damage they cause rise every year, the security awarenessof these attacks and their consideration during requirementselicitation remains negligible. We propose to use a card game to elicit these requirements, which all employees of a company can play to understand thethreat and document security requirements. The game considersthe individual context of a company and presents underlyingprinciples of human behaviour that social engineers exploit, aswell as concrete attack patterns. We evaluated our approachwith several groups of researchers, IT administrators, andprofessionals from industry.
---
paper_title: Social Engineering and Insider Threats

paper_content:

This paper describes our research on the insider threats of Social engineering. Social engineering is a method using interaction between humans to get the access of a system in an illegal way. Due to staff's lack of confidentiality, the confidentiality of records is compromised, data is stolen or financial damage is done. This is insider threat. Social engineering and insider threat are two of the most relevant subjects in cyber security today. This research summarizes and seeks solution for the drawback of Social engineering through analyzing the Insider Threat cases. The first stage is to introduce the importance of using social engineering to reduce internet crime by analyzing the past loss created by insider threats. The second test illustrates insider threats' hazards to network security are ongoing. The third part covers the situation of insider threats with the emphasis on the security side. The topic of security aspect is extended to the rest of internal control of system, data exchange, and management of employees and their communication content. Actually, by the time of this abstract, insider threats are still not being taken as seriously as it should be. Many companies and organizations have given little thought to the insider threat but have concentrated on keeping attackers outside the network. This research will directly focus on the insider threats of organizations and the ways hackers use social engineering with the latest analysis of technology involved and examples that are close to common cybercrime. We aim to reveal the importance of reducing insider threats in organizations. The further research will be focused on a group consisted of managers and engineers within a company and the communication means of staff to the outside world. The analysis of the related crime cases will help prevent similar tragedy and seek possible approaches.
---
paper_title: Social engineering attack examples, templates and scenarios

paper_content:

The field of information security is a fast-growing discipline. Even though the effectiveness of security measures to protect sensitive information is increasing, people remain susceptible to manipulation and thus the human element remains a weak link. A social engineering attack targets this weakness by using various manipulation techniques to elicit sensitive information. The field of social engineering is still in its early stages with regard to formal definitions, attack frameworks and templates of attacks. This paper proposes detailed social engineering attack templates that are derived from real-world social engineering examples. Current documented examples of social engineering attacks do not include all the attack steps and phases. The proposed social engineering attack templates attempt to alleviate the problem of limited documented literature on social engineering attacks by mapping the real-world examples to the social engineering attack framework. Mapping several similar real-world examples to the social engineering attack framework allows one to establish a detailed flow of the attack whilst abstracting subjects and objects. This mapping is then utilised to propose the generalised social engineering attack templates that are representative of real-world examples, whilst still being general enough to encompass several different real-world examples. The proposed social engineering attack templates cover all three types of communication, namely bidirectional communication, unidirectional communication and indirect communication. In order to perform comparative studies of different social engineering models, processes and frameworks, it is necessary to have a formalised set of social engineering attack scenarios that are fully detailed in every phase and step of the process. The social engineering attack templates are converted to social engineering attack scenarios by populating the template with both subjects and objects from real-world examples whilst still maintaining the detailed flow of the attack as provided in the template. Furthermore, this paper illustrates how the social engineering attack scenarios are applied to verify a social engineering attack detection model. These templates and scenarios can be used by other researchers to either expand on, use for comparative measures, create additional examples or evaluate models for completeness. Additionally, the proposed social engineering attack templates can also be used to develop social engineering awareness material.
---
paper_title: CANDY: A Social Engineering Attack to Leak Information from Infotainment System

paper_content:

The introduction of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) systems into vehicles make them more prone to cyber-security attacks that may impact of vehicles capability and, consequently, on the safety of drivers, passengers. In this paper, we focus on how to exploit security vulnerabilities affecting user-to-vehicle and intra- vehicle communications to hack the infotainment system to retrieve information about both vehicle and driver. Indeed, we designed and developed CANDY, a set of malicious APP injecting in a genuine Android APP, acting as a Trojan-horse on the Android In-Vehicle infotainment system. It opens a back-door that allows an attacker to remotely access to the infotainment system. We use this back-door to hit the privacy of the driver by recording her voice and collect information circulating on the CAN bus about the vehicle. CANDY is distributed by using social engineering techniques.
---
paper_title: Reverse TCP and Social Engineering Attacks in the Era of Big Data

paper_content:

TCP is a connection-oriented protocol used for the transport of information across the Internet. The very nature of this powerful medium attracts cyber criminals who are continuously searching for new vulnerabilities within the TCP protocol to exploit for nefarious means. Reverse TCP attacks are a relatively new approach to exploit this connection process. The attacker is able to seize remote access to the victim end user's network. Success in this attack largely depends on skillful social engineering techniques to target specific end users in order to open the connection. In the era of Big Data, social engineering are expected to be more feasible. This paper examines various methods that adversaries may use to implement their attacks. Our work implements a reverse TCP attack via a virtualized environment, detailing the process used to gain unauthorized access to victim's machine. This paper also discusses the key threats that the reverse TCP attack may pose to end users and will provide a testbed to determine how effective computer systems are able to defend against this attack.
---
paper_title: Social engineering as an attack vector for ransomware

paper_content:

Constant ransomware attacks achieve to evade multiple security perimeters, because its strategy is based on the exploitation of users-the weakest link in the security chain-getting high levels of effectiveness. In this paper, an in-depth analysis of the anatomy of the ransomware is develop, and how they combine technology with manipulation, through social engineering, to meet their goals and compromise thousands of computers. Finally, simulations of the phases that it follows are carried out, leaving the necessary guidelines to evaluate the security of the information, and thus, generate policies that minimize the risks of loss of information.
---
paper_title: Social Engineering Toolkit — A systematic approach to social engineering

paper_content:

Social engineering techniques, exploiting humans as information systems' security weakest link, are mostly the initial attack vectors within larger intrusions and information system compromises. In order to practically evaluate the risks of information leakage trough the target organizations' employees, when performing a penetration test, an ethical hacker must consider social engineering as a very important aspect of the performed test. Social Engineering Toolkit (SET) is an integrated set of tools designed specifically to perform advanced attacks against the human element, and is the most advanced, if not the only toolkit of such kind that is publicly available as open source software. Incorporating many social engineering attack vectors, it heavily depends on Metasploit, an integrated penetration testing framework. This paper gives a brief introduction to the Social Engineering Toolkit software architecture, and provides an overview of supported attack vectors.
---
paper_title: Social engineering and digital technologies for the security of the social capital' development

paper_content:

Social capital is transformed due to the digitalized environment built with the ICT expansion. The evolution of the social capital' forming and development reflects the new forms and models of communication, the extended possibilities of choice and of presence into the Web as a unique space of exchange. This article presents the theoretical approach to the analysis of behavior' regulation within the framework of social technologies implemented to the digital space. Social engineering represents an important factor of the violation of information security' rules, the IT-specialists attribute the majority of the crime in the sector to the insiders of private business companies and to the imprudence of individuals. The social capital can play the both positive and negative roles to assure information security issues, the social engineering can be in the contradiction with the tendencies of the social capital development, but the social technologies used are based on the social capital development.
---
paper_title: Security Analytics: Big Data Analytics for cybersecurity: A review of trends, techniques and tools

paper_content:

The rapid growth of the Internet has brought with it an exponential increase in the type and frequency of cyber attacks. Many well-known cybersecurity solutions are in place to counteract these attacks. However, the generation of Big Data over computer networks is rapidly rendering these traditional solutions obsolete. To cater for this problem, corporate research is now focusing on Security Analytics, i.e., the application of Big Data Analytics techniques to cybersecurity. Analytics can assist network managers particularly in the monitoring and surveillance of real-time network streams and real-time detection of both malicious and suspicious (outlying) patterns. Such a behavior is envisioned to encompass and enhance all traditional security techniques. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of Security Analytics, i.e., its description, technology, trends, and tools. It hence aims to convince the reader of the imminent application of analytics as an unparalleled cybersecurity solution in the near future.
---
paper_title: Security Evaluation of Wireless Network Access Points

paper_content:

Abstract The paper focuses on the real-world usage of IEEE 802.11 wireless network encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) function. A brief history on the development of encryption methods and WPS is given. Wireless scanning of 802.11 networks in a capital city has been performed, and the results of it have been analysed. To ascertain the knowledge about the security of wireless networks of the average user, an online survey has been conducted. To test the security of encryption methods and WPS function, practical attacks against private test wireless networks have been made. The authors conclude that the safest way to set up 802.11 network with a pre-shared key is to use Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) encryption without support for WPS function. Statistics in Riga shows that networks are often configured otherwise and thus vulnerable to attacks. Survey results prove that respondents are not well informed regarding the security of wireless networks.
---
paper_title: On tackling social engineering web phishing attacks utilizing software defined networks (SDN) approach

paper_content:

Web phishing attacks are one of the challenging security threats. Phishing depends on humans’ behavior but not protocols and devices vulnerabilities. In this work, software defined networking (SDN) will be tailored to tackle phishing attacks. In SDN, network devices forward received packets to a central point ‘controller’ that makes decision on behalf of them. This approach allows more control and management over network devices and protocol. In this work, we propose a neural network based phishing prevention algorithm (PPA) that is implemented utilizing Ryu, an open source, SDN controller. The PPA algorithm has been tested in a home network that is constructed with HP2920-24G switch. Moreover, a phished version of Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail login pages have been written and hosted on three different free hosting domains. PPA has detected all of the phished versions and allowed the access to real version of these services.
---
paper_title: Trust and Social Engineering in Human Robot Interaction: Will a Robot Make You Disclose Sensitive Information, Conform to Its Recommendations or Gamble?

paper_content:

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was designed to emulate a social engineering attack. At first, iCub attempted to collect the kind of personal information usually gathered by social engineers by asking a series of private questions. Then, the robot tried to develop trust and rapport with participants by offering reliable clues during a treasure hunt game. At the end of the treasure hunt, the robot tried to exploit the gained trust in order to make participants gamble the money they won. The results show that people tend to build rapport with and trust toward the robot, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive information, conformation to its suggestions and gambling.
---
paper_title: A Serious Game for Eliciting Social Engineering Security Requirements

paper_content:

Social engineering is the acquisition of informationabout computer systems by methods that deeply include non-technical means. While technical security of most critical systemsis high, the systems remain vulnerable to attacks from socialengineers. Social engineering is a technique that: (i) does notrequire any (advanced) technical tools, (ii) can be used by anyone,(iii) is cheap. Traditional security requirements elicitation approaches oftenfocus on vulnerabilities in network or software systems. Fewapproaches even consider the exploitation of humans via socialengineering and none of them elicits personal behaviours of indi-vidual employees. While the amount of social engineering attacksand the damage they cause rise every year, the security awarenessof these attacks and their consideration during requirementselicitation remains negligible. We propose to use a card game to elicit these requirements, which all employees of a company can play to understand thethreat and document security requirements. The game considersthe individual context of a company and presents underlyingprinciples of human behaviour that social engineers exploit, aswell as concrete attack patterns. We evaluated our approachwith several groups of researchers, IT administrators, andprofessionals from industry.
---
paper_title: Social Engineering and Insider Threats

paper_content:

This paper describes our research on the insider threats of Social engineering. Social engineering is a method using interaction between humans to get the access of a system in an illegal way. Due to staff's lack of confidentiality, the confidentiality of records is compromised, data is stolen or financial damage is done. This is insider threat. Social engineering and insider threat are two of the most relevant subjects in cyber security today. This research summarizes and seeks solution for the drawback of Social engineering through analyzing the Insider Threat cases. The first stage is to introduce the importance of using social engineering to reduce internet crime by analyzing the past loss created by insider threats. The second test illustrates insider threats' hazards to network security are ongoing. The third part covers the situation of insider threats with the emphasis on the security side. The topic of security aspect is extended to the rest of internal control of system, data exchange, and management of employees and their communication content. Actually, by the time of this abstract, insider threats are still not being taken as seriously as it should be. Many companies and organizations have given little thought to the insider threat but have concentrated on keeping attackers outside the network. This research will directly focus on the insider threats of organizations and the ways hackers use social engineering with the latest analysis of technology involved and examples that are close to common cybercrime. We aim to reveal the importance of reducing insider threats in organizations. The further research will be focused on a group consisted of managers and engineers within a company and the communication means of staff to the outside world. The analysis of the related crime cases will help prevent similar tragedy and seek possible approaches.
---
paper_title: Social engineering attack examples, templates and scenarios

paper_content:

The field of information security is a fast-growing discipline. Even though the effectiveness of security measures to protect sensitive information is increasing, people remain susceptible to manipulation and thus the human element remains a weak link. A social engineering attack targets this weakness by using various manipulation techniques to elicit sensitive information. The field of social engineering is still in its early stages with regard to formal definitions, attack frameworks and templates of attacks. This paper proposes detailed social engineering attack templates that are derived from real-world social engineering examples. Current documented examples of social engineering attacks do not include all the attack steps and phases. The proposed social engineering attack templates attempt to alleviate the problem of limited documented literature on social engineering attacks by mapping the real-world examples to the social engineering attack framework. Mapping several similar real-world examples to the social engineering attack framework allows one to establish a detailed flow of the attack whilst abstracting subjects and objects. This mapping is then utilised to propose the generalised social engineering attack templates that are representative of real-world examples, whilst still being general enough to encompass several different real-world examples. The proposed social engineering attack templates cover all three types of communication, namely bidirectional communication, unidirectional communication and indirect communication. In order to perform comparative studies of different social engineering models, processes and frameworks, it is necessary to have a formalised set of social engineering attack scenarios that are fully detailed in every phase and step of the process. The social engineering attack templates are converted to social engineering attack scenarios by populating the template with both subjects and objects from real-world examples whilst still maintaining the detailed flow of the attack as provided in the template. Furthermore, this paper illustrates how the social engineering attack scenarios are applied to verify a social engineering attack detection model. These templates and scenarios can be used by other researchers to either expand on, use for comparative measures, create additional examples or evaluate models for completeness. Additionally, the proposed social engineering attack templates can also be used to develop social engineering awareness material.
---
paper_title: CANDY: A Social Engineering Attack to Leak Information from Infotainment System

paper_content:

The introduction of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) systems into vehicles make them more prone to cyber-security attacks that may impact of vehicles capability and, consequently, on the safety of drivers, passengers. In this paper, we focus on how to exploit security vulnerabilities affecting user-to-vehicle and intra- vehicle communications to hack the infotainment system to retrieve information about both vehicle and driver. Indeed, we designed and developed CANDY, a set of malicious APP injecting in a genuine Android APP, acting as a Trojan-horse on the Android In-Vehicle infotainment system. It opens a back-door that allows an attacker to remotely access to the infotainment system. We use this back-door to hit the privacy of the driver by recording her voice and collect information circulating on the CAN bus about the vehicle. CANDY is distributed by using social engineering techniques.
---
paper_title: Reverse TCP and Social Engineering Attacks in the Era of Big Data

paper_content:

TCP is a connection-oriented protocol used for the transport of information across the Internet. The very nature of this powerful medium attracts cyber criminals who are continuously searching for new vulnerabilities within the TCP protocol to exploit for nefarious means. Reverse TCP attacks are a relatively new approach to exploit this connection process. The attacker is able to seize remote access to the victim end user's network. Success in this attack largely depends on skillful social engineering techniques to target specific end users in order to open the connection. In the era of Big Data, social engineering are expected to be more feasible. This paper examines various methods that adversaries may use to implement their attacks. Our work implements a reverse TCP attack via a virtualized environment, detailing the process used to gain unauthorized access to victim's machine. This paper also discusses the key threats that the reverse TCP attack may pose to end users and will provide a testbed to determine how effective computer systems are able to defend against this attack.
---
paper_title: Security and privacy challenges in smart cities

paper_content:

Abstract The construction of smart cities will bring about a higher quality of life to the masses through digital interconnectivity, leading to increased efficiency and accessibility in cities. Smart cities must ensure individual privacy and security in order to ensure that its citizens will participate. If citizens are reluctant to participate, the core advantages of a smart city will dissolve. This article will identify and offer possible solutions to five smart city challenges, in hopes of anticipating destabilizing and costly disruptions. The challenges include privacy preservation with high dimensional data, securing a network with a large attack surface, establishing trustworthy data sharing practices, properly utilizing artificial intelligence, and mitigating failures cascading through the smart network. Finally, further research directions are provided to encourage further exploration of smart city challenges before their construction.
---
paper_title: A literature survey on social engineering attacks: Phishing attack

paper_content:

Phishing is a network type attack where the attacker creates the fake of an existing webpage to fool an online user into elicit personal Information. The prime objective of this review is to do literature survey on social engineering attack: Phishing attack and techniques to detect attack. Phishing is the combination of social engineering and technical methods to convince the user to reveal their personal data. The paper discusses about the Phishing social engineering attack theoretically and their issues in the life of human Beings. Phishing is typically carried out by Email spoofing or instant messaging. It targets the user who has no knowledge about social engineering attacks, and internet security, like persons who do not take care of privacy of their accounts details such as Facebook, Gmail, credit banks accounts and other financial accounts. The paper discusses various types of Phishing attacks such as Tab-napping, spoofing emails, Trojan horse, hacking and how to prevent them. At the same time this paper also provides different techniques to detect these attacks so that they can be easily dealt with in case one of them occurs. The paper gives a thorough analysis of various Phishing attacks along with their advantages and disadvantages.
---
paper_title: A FORMAL CLASSIFICATION OF INTERNET BANKING ATTACKS AND VULNERABILITIES

paper_content:

A formal classification of attacks and vulnerabilities that affect current internet banking systems is presented along with two attacks which demonstrate the insecurity of such systems. Based ona thorough analysis of current security models, we propose a guidelines for designing secure internet banking systems which are not affected by the presented attacks and vulnerabilities .
---
paper_title: A framework to mitigate social engineering through social media within the enterprise

paper_content:

The influx of employees using social media throughout the working environment has presented information security professionals with an extensive array of challenges facing people, process and technology. Social engineering through social media is a formidable enterprise concern due to the proclivity of social engineers targeting employees through these mediums to attack information assets residing within the organization. This research was motivated by a perceived gap in academic literature of organizational controls and guidance for employees concerning social engineering threats through social media adoption. The purpose of this paper is to propose a social media policy framework focusing on the practical reduction of social engineering risk through ICT security policy control. The framework's development involved an analysis of the primary social engineering through social media challenges alongside current information security standard recommendations. The resulting proposal for the SESM (Social Engineering through Social Media) framework addresses these challenges by conceptualizing enterprise implementation through the interconnection of relevant existing IT security standards in juxtaposition with our own social media policy development framework.
---
paper_title: Email trouble: Secrets of spoofing, the dangers of social engineering, and how we can help

paper_content:

Email spoofing is a method of scamming individuals by impersonating a trusted correspondent via email. Incidences of successful Business Email Compromise (BEC) implemented by email spoofing are rising astronomically. Existing security systems are not widely implemented and cannot provide perfect protection against a technological threat that relies on social engineering for success. When existing security systems are implemented the settings are generally not restrictive enough to catch the more sophisticated email attacks. Businesses are not comfortable with legitimate emails being lost due to security false positives. Our idea for a solution would add a layer to existing precautions that would permit looser server-side security settings but would warn the user when discrepancies occur in the header source code that could result from a spoofed email. We suggest a client-side sentinel to vet email header source code and alert the user to potential problems. This software could log alerts, notify company officials, remind users of company policies to be followed in the event of suspicious email, and could increase user accountability by logging incidents. Users could have the option of white-listing frequently flagged trusted correspondents which would decrease the annoyance of false positives.
---
paper_title: Social Engineering Attack Strategies and Defence Approaches

paper_content:

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.
---
paper_title: Security and privacy challenges in smart cities

paper_content:

Abstract The construction of smart cities will bring about a higher quality of life to the masses through digital interconnectivity, leading to increased efficiency and accessibility in cities. Smart cities must ensure individual privacy and security in order to ensure that its citizens will participate. If citizens are reluctant to participate, the core advantages of a smart city will dissolve. This article will identify and offer possible solutions to five smart city challenges, in hopes of anticipating destabilizing and costly disruptions. The challenges include privacy preservation with high dimensional data, securing a network with a large attack surface, establishing trustworthy data sharing practices, properly utilizing artificial intelligence, and mitigating failures cascading through the smart network. Finally, further research directions are provided to encourage further exploration of smart city challenges before their construction.
---
paper_title: A framework to mitigate social engineering through social media within the enterprise

paper_content:

The influx of employees using social media throughout the working environment has presented information security professionals with an extensive array of challenges facing people, process and technology. Social engineering through social media is a formidable enterprise concern due to the proclivity of social engineers targeting employees through these mediums to attack information assets residing within the organization. This research was motivated by a perceived gap in academic literature of organizational controls and guidance for employees concerning social engineering threats through social media adoption. The purpose of this paper is to propose a social media policy framework focusing on the practical reduction of social engineering risk through ICT security policy control. The framework's development involved an analysis of the primary social engineering through social media challenges alongside current information security standard recommendations. The resulting proposal for the SESM (Social Engineering through Social Media) framework addresses these challenges by conceptualizing enterprise implementation through the interconnection of relevant existing IT security standards in juxtaposition with our own social media policy development framework.
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paper_title: Email trouble: Secrets of spoofing, the dangers of social engineering, and how we can help

paper_content:

Email spoofing is a method of scamming individuals by impersonating a trusted correspondent via email. Incidences of successful Business Email Compromise (BEC) implemented by email spoofing are rising astronomically. Existing security systems are not widely implemented and cannot provide perfect protection against a technological threat that relies on social engineering for success. When existing security systems are implemented the settings are generally not restrictive enough to catch the more sophisticated email attacks. Businesses are not comfortable with legitimate emails being lost due to security false positives. Our idea for a solution would add a layer to existing precautions that would permit looser server-side security settings but would warn the user when discrepancies occur in the header source code that could result from a spoofed email. We suggest a client-side sentinel to vet email header source code and alert the user to potential problems. This software could log alerts, notify company officials, remind users of company policies to be followed in the event of suspicious email, and could increase user accountability by logging incidents. Users could have the option of white-listing frequently flagged trusted correspondents which would decrease the annoyance of false positives.
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paper_title: CANDY: A Social Engineering Attack to Leak Information from Infotainment System

paper_content:

The introduction of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) systems into vehicles make them more prone to cyber-security attacks that may impact of vehicles capability and, consequently, on the safety of drivers, passengers. In this paper, we focus on how to exploit security vulnerabilities affecting user-to-vehicle and intra- vehicle communications to hack the infotainment system to retrieve information about both vehicle and driver. Indeed, we designed and developed CANDY, a set of malicious APP injecting in a genuine Android APP, acting as a Trojan-horse on the Android In-Vehicle infotainment system. It opens a back-door that allows an attacker to remotely access to the infotainment system. We use this back-door to hit the privacy of the driver by recording her voice and collect information circulating on the CAN bus about the vehicle. CANDY is distributed by using social engineering techniques.
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paper_title: Social Engineering and Insider Threats

paper_content:

This paper describes our research on the insider threats of Social engineering. Social engineering is a method using interaction between humans to get the access of a system in an illegal way. Due to staff's lack of confidentiality, the confidentiality of records is compromised, data is stolen or financial damage is done. This is insider threat. Social engineering and insider threat are two of the most relevant subjects in cyber security today. This research summarizes and seeks solution for the drawback of Social engineering through analyzing the Insider Threat cases. The first stage is to introduce the importance of using social engineering to reduce internet crime by analyzing the past loss created by insider threats. The second test illustrates insider threats' hazards to network security are ongoing. The third part covers the situation of insider threats with the emphasis on the security side. The topic of security aspect is extended to the rest of internal control of system, data exchange, and management of employees and their communication content. Actually, by the time of this abstract, insider threats are still not being taken as seriously as it should be. Many companies and organizations have given little thought to the insider threat but have concentrated on keeping attackers outside the network. This research will directly focus on the insider threats of organizations and the ways hackers use social engineering with the latest analysis of technology involved and examples that are close to common cybercrime. We aim to reveal the importance of reducing insider threats in organizations. The further research will be focused on a group consisted of managers and engineers within a company and the communication means of staff to the outside world. The analysis of the related crime cases will help prevent similar tragedy and seek possible approaches.
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paper_title: Blockchain-based Mutual Authentication Security Protocol for Distributed RFID Systems

paper_content:

Since radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been used in various scenarios such as supply chain, access control system and credit card, tremendous efforts have been made to improve the authentication between tags and readers to prevent potential attacks. Though effective in certain circumstances, these existing methods usually require a server to maintain a database of identity related information for every tag, which makes the system vulnerable to the SQL injection attack and not suitable for distributed environment. To address these problems, we now propose a novel blockchain-based mutual authentication security protocol. In this new scheme, there is no need for the trusted third parties to provide security and privacy for the system. Authentication is executed as an unmodifiable transaction based on blockchain rather than database, which applies to distributed RFID systems with high security demand and relatively low real-time requirement. Analysis shows that our protocol is logically correct and can prevent multiple attacks.
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paper_title: Social engineering as an attack vector for ransomware

paper_content:

Constant ransomware attacks achieve to evade multiple security perimeters, because its strategy is based on the exploitation of users-the weakest link in the security chain-getting high levels of effectiveness. In this paper, an in-depth analysis of the anatomy of the ransomware is develop, and how they combine technology with manipulation, through social engineering, to meet their goals and compromise thousands of computers. Finally, simulations of the phases that it follows are carried out, leaving the necessary guidelines to evaluate the security of the information, and thus, generate policies that minimize the risks of loss of information.
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paper_title: Dynamic ransomware protection using deterministic random bit generator

paper_content:

Ransomware has become a very significant cyber threat. The basic idea of ransomware was presented in the form of a cryptovirus in 1995. However, it was considered as merely a conceptual topic since then for over a decade. In 2017, ransomware has become a reality, with several famous cases of ransomware having compromised important computer systems worldwide. For example, the damage caused by CryptoLocker and WannaCry is huge, as well as global. They encrypt victims' files and require user's payment to decrypt them. Because they utilize public key cryptography, the key for recovery cannot be found in the footprint of the ransomware on the victim's system. Therefore, once infected, the system cannot be recovered without paying for restoration. Various methods to deal this threat have been developed by antivirus researchers and experts in network security. However, it is believed that cryptographic defense is infeasible because recovering a victim's files is computationally as difficult as breaking a public key cryptosystem. Quite recently, various approaches to protect the crypto-API of an OS from malicious codes have been proposed. Most ransomware generate encryption keys using the random number generation service provided by the victim's OS. Thus, if a user can control all random numbers generated by the system, then he/she can recover the random numbers used by the ransomware for the encryption key. In this paper, we propose a dynamic ransomware protection method that replaces the random number generator of the OS with a user-defined generator. As the proposed method causes the virus program to generate keys based on the output from the user-defined generator, it is possible to recover an infected file system by reproducing the keys the attacker used to perform the encryption.
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paper_title: Blockchain-based Mutual Authentication Security Protocol for Distributed RFID Systems

paper_content:

Since radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been used in various scenarios such as supply chain, access control system and credit card, tremendous efforts have been made to improve the authentication between tags and readers to prevent potential attacks. Though effective in certain circumstances, these existing methods usually require a server to maintain a database of identity related information for every tag, which makes the system vulnerable to the SQL injection attack and not suitable for distributed environment. To address these problems, we now propose a novel blockchain-based mutual authentication security protocol. In this new scheme, there is no need for the trusted third parties to provide security and privacy for the system. Authentication is executed as an unmodifiable transaction based on blockchain rather than database, which applies to distributed RFID systems with high security demand and relatively low real-time requirement. Analysis shows that our protocol is logically correct and can prevent multiple attacks.
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paper_title: Cutting the Gordian Knot: A Look Under the Hood of Ransomware Attacks

paper_content:

In this paper, we present the results of a long-term study of ransomware attacks that have been observed in the wild between 2006 and 2014. We also provide a holistic view on how ransomware attacks have evolved during this period by analyzing 1,359 samples that belong to 15 different ransomware families. Our results show that, despite a continuous improvement in the encryption, deletion, and communication techniques in the main ransomware families, the number of families with sophisticated destructive capabilities remains quite small. In fact, our analysis reveals that in a large number of samples, the malware simply locks the victim's computer desktop or attempts to encrypt or delete the victim's files using only superficial techniques.i?źOur analysis also suggests that stopping advanced ransomware attacks is not as complex as it has been previously reported. For example, we show that by monitoring abnormal file system activity, it is possible to design a practical defense system that could stop a large number of ransomware attacks, even those using sophisticated encryption capabilities. A close examination on the file system activities of multiple ransomware samples suggests that by looking at I/O requests and protecting Master File Table MFT in the NTFS file system, it is possible to detect and prevent a significant number of zero-day ransomware attacks.
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paper_title: An Approach To Perceive Tabnabbing Attack

paper_content:

The growth of Internet has many pros and cons to mankind, which is easily visible in day to day activities. The growth of Internet has also manifested into the other domain of cyber crimes. Phishing, web defacement, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. are some of the examples of cyber crimes that have been reported in literature. It has become vital to make technology reliable, so that it can record and intelligently apprise the user of illegal activity. The objective of this work is twofold. Firstly, in this paper tabnabbing which is a type of phishing attack is explored by developing an attack scenario. Secondly, the signature based detection mechanism is proposed to handle tabnabbing attack.
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paper_title: TabShots: client-side detection of tabnabbing attacks

paper_content:

As the web grows larger and larger and as the browser becomes the vehicle-of-choice for delivering many applications of daily use, the security and privacy of web users is under constant attack. Phishing is as prevalent as ever, with anti-phishing communities reporting thousands of new phishing campaigns each month. In 2010, tabnabbing, a variation of phishing, was introduced. In a tabnabbing attack, an innocuous-looking page, opened in a browser tab, disguises itself as the login page of a popular web application, when the user's focus is on a different tab. The attack exploits the trust of users for already opened pages and the user habit of long-lived browser tabs. To combat this recent attack, we propose TabShots. TabShots is a browser extension that helps browsers and users to remember what each tab looked like, before the user changed tabs. Our system compares the appearance of each tab and highlights the parts that were changed, allowing the user to distinguish between legitimate changes and malicious masquerading. Using an experimental evaluation on the most popular sites of the Internet, we show that TabShots has no impact on 78% of these sites, and very little on another 19%. Thereby, TabShots effectively protects users against tabnabbing attacks without affecting their browsing habits and without breaking legitimate popular sites.
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paper_title: A Serious Game for Eliciting Social Engineering Security Requirements

paper_content:

Social engineering is the acquisition of informationabout computer systems by methods that deeply include non-technical means. While technical security of most critical systemsis high, the systems remain vulnerable to attacks from socialengineers. Social engineering is a technique that: (i) does notrequire any (advanced) technical tools, (ii) can be used by anyone,(iii) is cheap. Traditional security requirements elicitation approaches oftenfocus on vulnerabilities in network or software systems. Fewapproaches even consider the exploitation of humans via socialengineering and none of them elicits personal behaviours of indi-vidual employees. While the amount of social engineering attacksand the damage they cause rise every year, the security awarenessof these attacks and their consideration during requirementselicitation remains negligible. We propose to use a card game to elicit these requirements, which all employees of a company can play to understand thethreat and document security requirements. The game considersthe individual context of a company and presents underlyingprinciples of human behaviour that social engineers exploit, aswell as concrete attack patterns. We evaluated our approachwith several groups of researchers, IT administrators, andprofessionals from industry.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy for Social Engineering attacks

paper_content:

As the technology to secure information improves, hackers will employ less technical means to get access to unauthorized data. The use of Social Engineering as a non tech method of hacking has been increasingly used during the past few years. There are different types of social engineering methods reported but what is lacking is a unifying effort to understand these methods in the aggregate. This paper aims to classify these methods through taxonomy so that organizations can gain a better understanding of these attack methods and accordingly be vigilant against them.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy for Social Engineering attacks

paper_content:

As the technology to secure information improves, hackers will employ less technical means to get access to unauthorized data. The use of Social Engineering as a non tech method of hacking has been increasingly used during the past few years. There are different types of social engineering methods reported but what is lacking is a unifying effort to understand these methods in the aggregate. This paper aims to classify these methods through taxonomy so that organizations can gain a better understanding of these attack methods and accordingly be vigilant against them.
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paper_title: SoK: Everyone Hates Robocalls: A Survey of Techniques Against Telephone Spam

paper_content:

Telephone spam costs United States consumers $8.6 billion annually. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission has received over 22 million complaints of illegal and wanted calls. Telephone spammers today are leveraging recent technical advances in the telephony ecosystem to distribute massive automated spam calls known as robocalls. Given that anti-spam techniques and approaches are effective in the email domain, the question we address is: what are the effective defenses against spam calls? In this paper, we first describe the telephone spam ecosystem, specifically focusing on the differences between email and telephone spam. Then, we survey the existing telephone spam solutions and, by analyzing the failings of the current techniques, derive evaluation criteria that are critical to an acceptable solution. We believe that this work will help guide the development of effective telephone spam defenses, as well as provide a framework to evaluate future defenses.
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paper_title: Advanced social engineering attacks

paper_content:

Social engineering has emerged as a serious threat in virtual communities and is an effective means to attack information systems. The services used by today's knowledge workers prepare the ground for sophisticated social engineering attacks. The growing trend towards BYOD (bring your own device) policies and the use of online communication and collaboration tools in private and business environments aggravate the problem. In globally acting companies, teams are no longer geographically co-located, but staffed just-in-time. The decrease in personal interaction combined with a plethora of tools used for communication (e-mail, IM, Skype, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Lync, etc.) create new attack vectors for social engineering attacks. Recent attacks on companies such as the New York Times and RSA have shown that targeted spear-phishing attacks are an effective, evolutionary step of social engineering attacks. Combined with zero-day-exploits, they become a dangerous weapon that is often used by advanced persistent threats. This paper provides a taxonomy of well-known social engineering attacks as well as a comprehensive overview of advanced social engineering attacks on the knowledge worker.
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paper_title: A client-side anti-pharming (CSAP) approach

paper_content:

Pharming is a type of social engineering attack wherein an attacker wants to steal sensitive information of internet users. Pharming is advanced technique than Phishing attack. In phishing, attacker's URL is different from targeted legitimate website URL but in case of pharming, attacker's URL is same to legitimate URL. Pharming attacks can be conducted by exploiting vulnerabilities in DNS server, which is more advanced type of attack than phishing. It's a special attack because the attacker doesn't have to target individual user. When attacker performs pharming on a Domain Name System (DNS) server, all users who are using DNS service through that server will fall victim of pharming attack. Various techniques are proposed for avoiding pharming attack. We present an approach which uses multiple DNS servers.
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paper_title: Social engineering: Revisiting end-user awareness and susceptibility to classic attack vectors

paper_content:

Social engineering relies on human vulnerability to exploit system security. Social engineering attacks are relatively harder to protect against as they mainly target the user, and not just hardware or software system defenses. End user awareness can be considered as one of the simplest yet most effective ways to protect the end user against social engineering vectors. The present study ascertains the level of user susceptibility to social engineering attacks in a cooperating corporate organization. Two attack scenarios, a spear-phishing campaign and a physical intrusion vector were designed targeting the organization's user population (employees) based on publicly available information from the Internet. Clues relating to social engineering techniques were included in the attacks to alert suspicious users. Despite the revealing signs of a social engineering campaign, the results indicated that a significantly high proportion (46–60%) of the users fell prey and failed to identify the attacks. It was observed that lack of user awareness remained the primary cause of the success of the attacks, requiring corrective action through post-incident training and regular IT security drills.
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paper_title: Mitigating social engineering for improved cybersecurity

paper_content:

In this paper, Social Engineering threats and trends are investigated and mitigation strategies recommended. The national and economic security of countries now relies on the Cyberspace because virtually all businesses processes are using the Internet. Unfortunately, Cyber-criminality is increasing and rated the fastest growing crime worldwide. Social engineering, a technique whereby cybercriminals trick their victims into disclosing log-in information without using any technical gadget has been identified as one of the most dangerous threats of our time. Due to the fact that any identity theft or breach in an organization's information system resulting in disclosure of sensitive information could have far-reaching consequences such as financial losses, disruption of services, damage to public image, or even bringing the organization or a nation to a complete standstill, this paper x-rayed most prevalent social engineering attacks, their typical tools and recommended mitigation strategies.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy for Social Engineering attacks

paper_content:

As the technology to secure information improves, hackers will employ less technical means to get access to unauthorized data. The use of Social Engineering as a non tech method of hacking has been increasingly used during the past few years. There are different types of social engineering methods reported but what is lacking is a unifying effort to understand these methods in the aggregate. This paper aims to classify these methods through taxonomy so that organizations can gain a better understanding of these attack methods and accordingly be vigilant against them.
---
paper_title: An Approach To Perceive Tabnabbing Attack

paper_content:

The growth of Internet has many pros and cons to mankind, which is easily visible in day to day activities. The growth of Internet has also manifested into the other domain of cyber crimes. Phishing, web defacement, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. are some of the examples of cyber crimes that have been reported in literature. It has become vital to make technology reliable, so that it can record and intelligently apprise the user of illegal activity. The objective of this work is twofold. Firstly, in this paper tabnabbing which is a type of phishing attack is explored by developing an attack scenario. Secondly, the signature based detection mechanism is proposed to handle tabnabbing attack.
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paper_title: A layered defense mechanism for a social engineering aware perimeter

paper_content:

While many cyber security organizations urge the corporate world to use defence-in-depth to create vigilant network perimeters, the human factor is often overlooked. Security evaluation frameworks focus mostly on critical assets of an organization and technical aspects of prevailing risks. There is consequently no specific framework to identify, categorize, analyse and mitigate social engineering related risks. This paper identifies the requirement for such a framework through an in-depth investigation of an actual organization and extensive analysis of existing methodologies. On the basis of this a layered defence strategy SERA is developed, starting with the basic building blocks for social-engineering aware risk analysis. A chronological attack classification framework is presented as an enhancement of existing frameworks on social engineering.
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paper_title: An Overview of Social Engineering in the Context of Information Security

paper_content:

Social engineering in the context of information security is the exploitation of human psychology to gain access into secure data. Human emotion can act as both a strength and a weakness. When it comes to the world booming with technology, human emotions which are completely unrelated to the matter is made to relate through social engineering. Social engineering employs ‘traps’ to pry on human emotion and its vulnerability, taking advantage of the flaws of human psychology. Information security breaches utilising social engineering techniques are vast, so that social engineering in this context is a topic which could not be neglected. This research paper presents an overview of social engineering attacks and suggested defence mechanisms. An introduction to social engineering attacks are given, with context to the current trends and related vulnerabilities. Main reasons for the spread of social engineering attacks in the current context are also presented. Attack frameworks are presented and defence approaches are proposed at the end.
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paper_title: Vulnerability to social engineering in social networks: a proposed user-centric framework

paper_content:

Social networking sites have billions of users who communicate and share their personal information every day. Social engineering is considered one of the biggest threats to information security nowadays. Social engineering is an attacker technique to manipulate and deceive users in order to access or gain privileged information. Such attacks are continuously developed to deceive a high number of potential victims. The number of social engineering attacks has risen dramatically in the past few years, causing unpleasant damage both to organizations and individuals. Yet little research has discussed social engineering in the virtual environments of social networks. One approach to counter these exploits is through research that aims to understand why people fall victim to such attacks. Previous social engineering and deception research have not satisfactory identified the factors that influence the users’ ability to detect attacks. Characteristics that influence users’ vulnerability must be investigated to address this issue and help to build a profile for vulnerable users in order to focus on increasing the training programs and education for those users. In this context, the present study proposes a user-centric framework to understand the user's susceptibility, relevant factors and dimensions.
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paper_title: Malicious PDF detection using metadata and structural features

paper_content:

Owed to their versatile functionality and widespread adoption, PDF documents have become a popular avenue for user exploitation ranging from large-scale phishing attacks to targeted attacks. In this paper, we present a framework for robust detection of malicious documents through machine learning. Our approach is based on features extracted from document metadata and structure. Using real-world datasets, we demonstrate the the adequacy of these document properties for malware detection and the durability of these features across new malware variants. Our analysis shows that the Random Forests classification method, an ensemble classifier that randomly selects features for each individual classification tree, yields the best detection rates, even on previously unseen malware. Indeed, using multiple datasets containing an aggregate of over 5,000 unique malicious documents and over 100,000 benign ones, our classification rates remain well above 99% while maintaining low false positives of 0.2% or less for different classification parameters and experimental scenarios. Moreover, the classifier has the ability to detect documents crafted for targeted attacks and separate them from broadly distributed malicious PDF documents. Remarkably, we also discovered that by artificially reducing the influence of the top features in the classifier, we can still achieve a high rate of detection in an adversarial setting where the attacker is aware of both the top features utilized in the classifier and our normality model. Thus, the classifier is resilient against mimicry attacks even with knowledge of the document features, classification method, and training set.
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paper_title: Measuring Source Credibility of Social Engineering Attackers on Facebook

paper_content:

Past research has suggested that social networking sites are the most common source for social engineering-based attacks. Persuasion research shows that people are more likely to obey and accept a message when the source’s presentation appears to be credible. However, many factors can impact the perceived credibility of a source, depending on its type and the characteristics of the environment. Our previous research showed that there are four dimensions of source credibility in terms of social engineering on Facebook: perceived sincerity, perceived competence, perceived attraction, and perceived worthiness. Because the dimensionalities of source credibility as well as their measurement scales can fluctuate from one type of source to another and from one type of context to another, our aim in this study includes validating the existence of those four dimensions toward the credibility of social engineering attackers on Facebook and developing a valid measurement scale for every dimension of them.
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paper_title: Flow whitelisting in SCADA networks

paper_content:

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks are commonly deployed to aid the operation of large industrial facilities. Modern SCADA networks are becoming more vulnerable to network attacks, due to the now common use of standard communication protocols and increased interconnection to corporate networks and the Internet. In this work, we propose an approach to improve the security of these networks based on flow whitelisting. A flow whitelist describes the legitimate traffic solely using four properties of network packets: the client address, the server address, the server-side port, and the transport protocol. The proposed approach consists in learning a flow whitelist by capturing network traffic and aggregating it into flows for a given period of time. After this learning phase is complete, any non-whitelisted connection observed generates an alarm. The evaluation of the approach focuses on two important whitelist characteristics: size and stability. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach using real-world traffic traces, captured in two water treatment plants and a gas and electric utility.
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paper_title: A model for social engineering awareness program for schools

paper_content:

Advancements in security has over the years of technological growth been mainly focused on providing secured technological infrastructure. The developed security measures and counter-measures have played a major role in reducing the surge of cyber-attacks. However, hackers have continued to exploit vulnerabilities due to the human element to gain access into otherwise secured systems. Risks and potential for exploits are more so in schools where the human vulnerability is enhanced by young impressionable pupils. Social engineering, the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information, is increasingly the approach of choice for hackers who exploit the human element. Social engineers bypass secured systems in schools by directing targeting and exploiting the human vulnerabilities of school's students and staff. Education through awareness campaigns are typically used in countering the threat from social engineering. Such awareness campaigns tend to however be too holistic in focus to lead to the significant and sustainable change in behaviour required to counter social engineering. This paper presents a model for designing and implementing social engineering awareness programmes aimed at fostering behaviour change in schools. It demonstrates the process of designing a social engineering awareness program to meet all types of learning styles by using different multiple communication methods. Evaluation and continuous reinforcement approaches are also presented. A pilot implementation of our proposed model for social engineering awareness programme shows a significant change in behaviour of school's teaching staff.
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paper_title: Social Engineering: Hacking into Humans

paper_content:

In this world of digitalization, the need for data privacy and data security is quite important. The IT companies today prefer their data over everything. Not only for companies, the data privacy important for any individual. But no matter how secure is the company, how advanced is the technology used or how much up to date their software is, there's still a vulnerability in every sector known as ‘Human'. The art of gathering sensitive information from a human being is known as Social Engineering. Technology has increased drastically in the past few years but the threat of Social engineering is still a problem. Social engineering attacks are ince=reasing day by day due to lack of awareness and knowledge. Social engineering is a really common practice to gather information and sensitive data through the use of mobile numbers, emails, SMS or direct approach. Social engineering can be really useful for the attacker if done in a proper manner.'Kevin Mitnik' is the most renowned social engineers of all time. In this paper, we are going to discuss Social Engineering, its types, how it affects us and how to prevent these attacks. Also, many proofs of Concepts are also presented in this paper.
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paper_title: Social engineering attack modeling with the use of Bayesian networks

paper_content:

The problem of modeling socio-engineering attacks on the user's machine using a Bayesian belief networks. The system models the complex “information system - personnel - critical documents” presented in the form of Bayesian belief networks, containing a set of psychological characteristics. This approach can significantly improve the performance and productivity of software for the analysis of security of user information system.
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paper_title: Protocols for mitigating blackhole attacks in delay tolerant networks

paper_content:

High node mobility and infrequent connectivity in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) makes it challenging to implement traditional security algorithms for detecting malicious nodes. In DTN, most of the routing algorithms are based on the announcement of routing metrics like probability of delivery, contact strength or social group strength by the nodes in contact. Blackhole in DTN exploits these characteristics of routing protocols and either announces a high value of these metrics or tries to attain a high value for them by following fast, repeated movement patterns. Dynamic social grouping (DSG) based routing algorithm shows that social behavior of nodes helps to make better forwarding decisions and to achieve highest message delivery ratio amongst other existing routing algorithms. We examine the impact of blackholes, intermittent blackholes and tailgating attack on DSG. We propose a suit of three solutions. Our first solution detects blackholes and tailgating malicious nodes in the network, however, is not suitable for intermittent blackholes. Second solution handles intermittent blackholes and performs well when the nodes are well connected. The third and final solution handles intermittent blackholes in sparsely connected as well as in well-connected networks. In all proposed solutions, blackholes are not able to degrade the performance of the protocols by changing their geographical locations. We demonstrate through simulation that our protocols improve upon the message delivery ratio over the existing solutions. An appropriate protocol from the suit may be used depending upon an application.
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paper_title: A New Method for Detection of Phishing Websites: URL Detection

paper_content:

Phishing is an unlawful activity wherein people are misled into the wrong sites by using various fraudulent methods. The aim of these phishing websites is to confiscate personal information or other financial details for personal benefits or misuse. As technology advances, the phishing approaches used need to get progressed and there is a dire need for better security and better mechanisms to prevent as well as detect these phishing approaches. The primary focus of this paper is to put forth a model as a solution to detect phishing websites by using the URL detection method using Random Forest algorithm. There are 3 major phases such as Parsing, Heuristic Classification of data, Performance Analysis in this model and each phase makes use of a different technique or algorithm for processing of data to give better results.
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paper_title: CryptoLock (and Drop It): Stopping Ransomware Attacks on User Data

paper_content:

Ransomware is a growing threat that encrypts auser's files and holds the decryption key until a ransom ispaid by the victim. This type of malware is responsible fortens of millions of dollars in extortion annually. Worse still, developing new variants is trivial, facilitating the evasion of manyantivirus and intrusion detection systems. In this work, we presentCryptoDrop, an early-warning detection system that alerts a userduring suspicious file activity. Using a set of behavior indicators, CryptoDrop can halt a process that appears to be tampering witha large amount of the user's data. Furthermore, by combininga set of indicators common to ransomware, the system can beparameterized for rapid detection with low false positives. Ourexperimental analysis of CryptoDrop stops ransomware fromexecuting with a median loss of only 10 files (out of nearly5,100 available files). Our results show that careful analysis ofransomware behavior can produce an effective detection systemthat significantly mitigates the amount of victim data loss.
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paper_title: Social engineering in social networking sites: Affect-based model

paper_content:

While social engineering represents a real and ominous threat to many organizations, companies, governments, and individuals, social networking sites (SNSs), have been identified as among the most common means of social engineering attacks. Owing to factors that reduce the ability of users to detect social engineering tricks and increase the ability of attackers to launch them, SNSs seem to be perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, and the weakest link in security. This work will contribute to the knowledge of social engineering by identifying different entities and subentities that affect social engineering based attacks in SNSs. Moreover, this paper includes an intensive and comprehensive overview of different aspects of social engineering threats in SNSs.
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paper_title: Improving Awareness of Social Engineering Attacks

paper_content:

Social engineering is a method of attack involving the exploitation of human weakness, gullibility and ignorance. Although related techniques have existed for some time, current awareness of social engineering and its many guises is relatively low and efforts are therefore required to improve the protection of the user community. This paper begins by examining the problems posed by social engineering, and outlining some of the previous efforts that have been made to address the threat. This leads toward the discussion of a new awareness-raising website that has been specifically designed to aid users in understanding and avoiding the risks. Findings from an experimental trial involving 46 participants are used to illustrate that the system served to increase users’ understanding of threat concepts, as well as providing an engaging environment in which they would be likely to persevere with their learning.
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paper_title: Solutions for counteracting human deception in social engineering attacks

paper_content:

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the top three cybersecurity issues in organizations related to social engineering and aggregate solutions for counteracting human deception in social engineering attacks.,A total of 20 experts within Information System Security Association participated in a three-round Delphi study for aggregating and condensing expert opinions. Three rounds moved participants toward consensus for solutions to counteract social engineering attacks in organizations.,Three significant issues: compromised data; ineffective practices; and lack of ongoing education produced three target areas for implementing best practices in countering social engineering attacks. The findings offer counteractions by including education, policies, processes and continuous training in security practices.,Study limitations include lack of prior data on effective social engineering defense. Research implications stem from the psychology of human deception and trust with the ability to detect deception.,Practical implications relate to human judgment in complying with effective security policies and programs and consistent education and training. Future research may include exploring financial, operational and educational costs of implementing social engineering solutions.,Social implications apply across all knowledge workers who benefit from technology and are trusted to protect organizational assets and intellectual property.,This study contributes to the field of cybersecurity with a focus on trust and human deception to investigate solutions to counter social engineering attacks. This paper adds to under-represented cybersecurity research regarding effective implementation for social engineering defense.
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paper_title: Cyber and Physical Security Vulnerability Assessment for IoT-Based Smart Homes

paper_content:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm focusing on the connection of devices, objects, or “things” to each other, to the Internet, and to users. IoT technology is anticipated to become an essential requirement in the development of smart homes, as it offers convenience and efficiency to home residents so that they can achieve better quality of life. Application of the IoT model to smart homes, by connecting objects to the Internet, poses new security and privacy challenges in terms of the confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of the data sensed, collected, and exchanged by the IoT objects. These challenges make smart homes extremely vulnerable to different types of security attacks, resulting in IoT-based smart homes being insecure. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the possible security risks to develop a complete picture of the security status of smart homes. This article applies the operationally critical threat, asset, and vulnerability evaluation (OCTAVE) methodology, known as OCTAVE Allegro, to assess the security risks of smart homes. The OCTAVE Allegro method focuses on information assets and considers different information containers such as databases, physical papers, and humans. The key goals of this study are to highlight the various security vulnerabilities of IoT-based smart homes, to present the risks on home inhabitants, and to propose approaches to mitigating the identified risks. The research findings can be used as a foundation for improving the security requirements of IoT-based smart homes.
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paper_title: Cutting the Gordian Knot: A Look Under the Hood of Ransomware Attacks

paper_content:

In this paper, we present the results of a long-term study of ransomware attacks that have been observed in the wild between 2006 and 2014. We also provide a holistic view on how ransomware attacks have evolved during this period by analyzing 1,359 samples that belong to 15 different ransomware families. Our results show that, despite a continuous improvement in the encryption, deletion, and communication techniques in the main ransomware families, the number of families with sophisticated destructive capabilities remains quite small. In fact, our analysis reveals that in a large number of samples, the malware simply locks the victim's computer desktop or attempts to encrypt or delete the victim's files using only superficial techniques.i?źOur analysis also suggests that stopping advanced ransomware attacks is not as complex as it has been previously reported. For example, we show that by monitoring abnormal file system activity, it is possible to design a practical defense system that could stop a large number of ransomware attacks, even those using sophisticated encryption capabilities. A close examination on the file system activities of multiple ransomware samples suggests that by looking at I/O requests and protecting Master File Table MFT in the NTFS file system, it is possible to detect and prevent a significant number of zero-day ransomware attacks.
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paper_title: From Intrusion Detection to an Intrusion Response System: Fundamentals, Requirements, and Future Directions

paper_content:

In the past few decades, the rise in attacks on communication devices in networks has resulted in a reduction of network functionality, throughput, and performance. To detect and mitigate these network attacks, researchers, academicians, and practitioners developed Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) with automatic response systems. The response system is considered an important component of IDS, since without a timely response IDSs may not function properly in countering various attacks, especially on a real-time basis. To respond appropriately, IDSs should select the optimal response option according to the type of network attack. This research study provides a complete survey of IDSs and Intrusion Response Systems (IRSs) on the basis of our in-depth understanding of the response option for different types of network attacks. Knowledge of the path from IDS to IRS can assist network administrators and network staffs in understanding how to tackle different attacks with state-of-the-art technologies.
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paper_title: Scoping the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge

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Cybersecurity is becoming an important element in curricula at all education levels. However, the foundational knowledge on which the field of cybersecurity is being developed is fragmented, and as a result, it can be difficult for both students and educators to map coherent paths of progression through the subject. The Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK) project (www.cybok.org) aims to codify the foundational and generally recognized knowledge on cybersecurity.
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paper_title: Online Social Networks Security: Threats, Attacks, and Future Directions

paper_content:

A list of well-known Online Social Networks extend to hundreds of available sites with hundreds of thousands, millions, and even billions of registered accounts; for instance, Facebook as of April 2016 has around two billion active users. Online Social Networks made a difference in many people’s lives and helped in opening avenues that were not possible before. However, as in any success story there is a downside. Cyber-attacks that used to have a small or limited effect can now have a huge distributed effect through utilizing those social network sites. Some attacks are more apparent than others in this context; hence this chapter discusses how serious attacks are possible in online social networks and what has been done to encounter them. It will discuss privacy, Sybil attacks, social engineering, spam, malware, botnet attacks, and the trade-off between services, security, and users’ rights.
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paper_title: A Taxonomy of Attacks and a Survey of Defence Mechanisms for Semantic Social Engineering Attacks

paper_content:

Social engineering is used as an umbrella term for a broad spectrum of computer exploitations that employ a variety of attack vectors and strategies to psychologically manipulate a user. Semantic attacks are the specific type of social engineering attacks that bypass technical defences by actively manipulating object characteristics, such as platform or system applications, to deceive rather than directly attack the user. Commonly observed examples include obfuscated URLs, phishing emails, drive-by downloads, spoofed websites and scareware to name a few. This article presents a taxonomy of semantic attacks, as well as a survey of applicable defences. By contrasting the threat landscape and the associated mitigation techniques in a single comparative matrix, we identify the areas where further research can be particularly beneficial.
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paper_title: The social engineering attack spiral (SEAS)

paper_content:

Cybercrime is on the increase and attacks are becoming ever more sophisticated. Organisations are investing huge sums of money and vast resources in trying to establish effective and timely countermeasures. This is still a game of catch up, where hackers have the upper hand and potential victims are trying to produce secure systems hardened against what feels like are inevitable future attacks. The focus so far has been on technology and not people and the amount of resource allocated to countermeasures and research into cyber security attacks follows the same trend. This paper adds to the growing body of work looking at social engineering attacks and therefore seeks to redress this imbalance to some extent. The objective is to produce a model for social engineering that provides a better understanding of the attack process such that improved and timely countermeasures can be applied and early interventions implemented.
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Title: Social Engineering Attacks: A Survey

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Provide an introduction about social engineering attacks, their impact on cybersecurity, and the importance of the survey.

Section 2: Social Engineering Attacks
Description 2: Discuss the significance and different phases of social engineering attacks.

Section 3: Attacks Classification
Description 3: Classify social engineering attacks into human-based, computer-based, social, technical, and physical-based categories.

Section 4: Attacks Description
Description 4: Describe various types of social engineering attacks such as phishing, pretexting, baiting, tailgating, ransomware, fake software attacks, reverse social engineering, pop-up windows, phone/email scams, robocalls, and others.

Section 5: Prevention Techniques
Description 5: Discuss various techniques and strategies to prevent social engineering attacks including training, policies, anti-phishing tools, and other security measures.

Section 6: Mitigation Techniques
Description 6: Outline techniques to mitigate and handle social engineering attacks after they occur, including human-based and technology-based strategies.

Section 7: Comparison
Description 7: Compare different countermeasures and mitigation techniques for social engineering attacks.

Section 8: Challenges and Future Directions
Description 8: Identify key challenges and suggest future directions for improving the detection, prevention, and mitigation of social engineering attacks.

Section 9: Conclusions
Description 9: Summarize the findings of the survey, discuss the importance of novel detection techniques and programs, and emphasize the need for cybersecurity education.