Reverse Social Engineering Attack

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Reverse social engineering

A reverse social engineering attack is a person-to-person attack in which an attacker convinces the target that he or she has a problem or might have a certain problem in the future and that he, the attacker, is ready to help solve the problem. Reverse social engineering is performed through the following steps:

1.An attacker first damages the target equipment.

2. He next advertises himself as a person of authority, ably skilled in solving that problem.

3.In this step, he gains the trust of the target and obtains access to sensitive information.

If the reverse social engineering is performed well enough to convince the target, he often calls the attacker and asks for help.

How Reverse Social
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Basically, poor awareness and poor operational procedures cause individuals to respond incorrectly to compromising situations. As with social engineering,

simple countermeasures such as the following can prevent the most sophisticated reverse attacks:

Identifying direct computer support analysts: A diligent analyst could then alert the rest of the organization of a possible

attack. As part of this vigilance, computer support analysts should use due diligence when software updates are obtained. If users know who to go to for technical support, they would not likely respond to anonymous letters or postings. Users would also probably alert their support analysts if there were an unusual occurrence.

Preventing employees from retrieving programs off electronic forums: -

People retrieve information from all over the world. Software inevitably gets retrieved as well. A company's policy should call for a ban on any utilities that do not come from the computer services organization. Many organizations have policies that prohibit the use of outside disks in organizational computer systems. These policies are important, but they must be updated to account for worldwide telecommunication systems, such as the