Social engineering - how you can keep from falling victim
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Posted On :
Nov-08-2011
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Article Word Count :
448
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Social engineering is when a person pretends to be someone he or she is not in order to gain access to resources or information. It is nothing new, but it is a threat that is on the rise - and many people fall victim to it.
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Social engineering is when a person pretends to be someone he or she is not in order to gain access to resources or information. It is nothing new, but it is a threat that is on the rise - and many people fall victim to it. There are several ways to do this, including calling someone on the phone, e-mailing, or actually going to the company's physical location, looking for information by talking to people or searching for passwords or papers. The real threat of social engineering lies within people's tendency to accept and trust others that they can talk to in real life versus online. People have learned to be careful revealing information online to someone who claims to have authorization, but they should be more careful about who they reveal sensitive information to offline as well.
There have been cases where a so-called IT representative will call a company, saying that they need the administrative password in order to fix a problem, or a person pretending to be a janitor coming in to watch people work and try to swipe passwords. In either of these cases, if the con artist acts confident enough as though he or she is supposed to be there, employees will accept it without a question or a second thought. However, your business information and resources should be protected, so you should never just take someone's word for it.
So what should you do? It's not always easy to enforce security policies, but it's a start to even draft one. Make sure that your employees password protect their computers and lock them when they aren't using them, that they always ask for authentication and ID from someone who claims to have the authorization to access information, that they regularly change their passwords and don't write them down. Strong passwords can be difficult to remember, but one trick is to take a phrase that means something to you (like a line from a song) and use the first letter of each word, alternating between lower and uppercase. Then you can add a number to the end as well as a special character (such as an asterisk or exclamation point). That will keep someone from easily guessing it - so long as you memorize it and don't write it down.
Security is a topic that is a lot more extensive than can be covered in one article - or even ten. However, you should be careful to protect your business and account information because it is the most valuable asset you have. If you are careful and watchful, and always ask questions, then you will dodge a lot of potential problems.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Social engineering - how you can keep from falling victim_101624.aspx
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Author Resource :
About Infigra E-Commerce:
Infigra E-Commerce is a Charlotte, NC based company that offers software as a solution (SaaS) and enables retailers to increase their sales by offering sophisticated e-commerce management tools. Our mission is to help move inventory by increasing the product visibility on different online global marketplace segments, such as Ebay and Amazon.
For more information, visit www.infigra.com
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Keywords :
business, social engineering, security, technology, scammers, scams,
Category :
Internet Business
:
Security
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