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What is Social Engineering?
social engineering is when an attacker attempts to take advantage of human behavior in order to persuade the user to perform an action. Examples:
- popping up a window that says your computer is horribly
infected and asking if you would like to perform a scan
- any legitimate program (like Windows or AVG or Windows Defender) will just do what it is supposed to do - it won't ask...
- pretending to be your bank (or PayPal or eBay) asking you to login to fix something (the link goes to a fake site and steals your username and password when you type it)
- pretending to be from the IT dept and requesting usernames and passwords
- offering "FREE" anything - screensavers, cursors, desktop pictures...
- offering a huge sum of money for little or no work
- someone called you on the phone asking for your account username and password
Antivirus software and updated security patches make it difficult for a criminal to install their software on your computer. But EVERYTHING gets bypassed if the person at the keyboard just hands it over... or clicks on something (even if it's a No button - they lie - see rogue antivirus description)