Social engineering is a way of gaining access to systems and data without breaking in and using hacking techniques but trough exploiting human psychology. The social engineer’s methods have been in the market for so long and were very popular in the 90s.

Social engineers use various ways to trick the victim. They can call any employee and pretends to be from the organization or IT experts. They gather sensitive information like login and passwords. Here are five signs that you’re socially engineered.

Asking for login information

The common way of social engineering is an email, website or phone call asking for your login information. The attacker tries to get your login, and once they have it, they use it against you. They can log in into your account, take control, and can easily take some action against you or your organization.

The best way is to secure your account from attackers is using two-factor authentication and password manager.

The scammers call the victim and pretending to be from Microsoft. They will convince the victim that a virus infects their computer system, and they want to proactive help. They will further get details of your credit card/Paypal/bank account and hack it.

Asking you to execute content

You may receive an email, a social media post, or visiting websites that will ask you to execute content. You may receive an email from a website asking you to run a such-and-such update to continue to the website.

When you open the email or click on the link, it means you are executing or installing malicious code, called a “dropper file”. The dropper file further takes over your system and dial hoe to get additional malware.

Stressor events

The social engineers online and over the phone use stressor events. It is a pending emergency which they attackers instruct the victim to do in the right way or wise something terrible can happen. They will provide limit time to think and will ask you to respond quickly. They may ask for the following things

• They will ask you to submit your login credentials; otherwise, your account will be permanently locked.
• Will ask you to run a software update, or your stored content will be removed.
• They may ask you for proof of ownership of your account/credit card/bank account information, or it will be permanently closed.