Method of Counteraction in Social Engineering on Information Activity Objectives

TL;DR

This paper investigates social engineering attacks like fake access points and phishing, analyzing their mechanisms and proposing countermeasures by testing attack methods in educational settings to improve user awareness and security.

Contribution

It introduces practical attack simulation setups using accessible components and analyzes user responses, highlighting the need for enhanced awareness strategies against social engineering.

Findings

High success rate of social engineering attacks in educational institutions

User awareness remains insufficient despite technical knowledge

Proposed methods can be implemented broadly for security enhancement

Abstract

The article presents a study using attacks such as a fake access point and a phishing page. The previous publications on social engineering have been reviewed, statistics of break-ups are analyzed and directions and mechanism of realization of attacks having elements of social engineering are analyzed. The data from the research in three different places were collected and analyzed and the content statistics were provided. For comparison, three categories of higher education institutions were chosen: technical, humanitarian and mixed profiles. Since the research was conducted in educational institutions during the week, most students in the experiment and graduate students took part in the experiment. For each educational institution, a registration form template was created that mimicked the design of the main pages. Examples of hardware and software implementation of a typical stand for attack, data collection and analysis are given. In order to construct a test stand, widely available components were chosen to show how easy it is to carry out attacks of this kind without significant initial costs and special skills. The article provides statistics on the number of connections, permission to use the address of the e-mail and password, as well as permission to automatically transfer service data to the browser (cookies). The statistics are processed using specially written algorithms. The proposed approaches to solving the problem of socio-technical attacks can be used and implemented for operation on any objects of information activity. As a result of the experiments, it is clear that the awareness of users of even technical specialties is not enough, so one needs to pay particular attention to the development of methods for raising awareness of users and reducing the number of potential attacks on objects of information activity.