Social Engineering Attacks are the most common form of cyber-attacks as it mainly deals with manipulating users over online by sending different text messages, links and files over the Internet. The hacker will wait for the user to make a mistake by clicking them and gains access, steals the data accordingly (Conklin, White, Williams, Davis, & Cothren, 2010). One of the examples of Social Engineering victim is the Ubiquiti Networks Company related to computer networking Industry operates from the United States. In the year 2015, the company had lost about $46.7 million due to the phishing attack by the hackers who mainly targeted the employees, managers by impersonating them and making fake messages and requests through emails (Hackett, 2015). The phishing worked well for the hackers and they were able to transfer the money into their accounts by gaining the access whenever the manager or employees access the fake messages. It made a huge impact on the company as they were only able to recover only $8.1 million.
There are certain measures that could have prevented the Ubiquiti networks company against such social engineering attacks. The first measure would be the implementation of two-factor authentication for each system that is utilized by the employees. The phone-based verification is very popular using OTP’s and it should be linked with every system that helps in restricting majority of the attacks. Goyal et al. suggested to adopt the hash functions and random number generating techniques at sender and receiver for secured connection while dealing with both the mobile and desktop systems (Goyal, Vakil, Parmar, Jain, & Jinwala, 2015). Software’s for spam filters and firewalls will be appropriate to restrict such attacks further.
References
Conklin, A., White, G., Williams, D., Davis, R., & Cothren, C. (2010). Principles of Computer Security; Second Edition. New York: Tata McGraw-Hill Education.
Goyal, T., Vakil, A., Parmar, D., Jain, R., & Jinwala, D. C. (2015). Preventing Phishing Attacks: A Novel Approach. International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol. 121, No. 14, 8-12.
Hackett, R. (2015, August 10). Fraudsters duped this company into handing over $40 million. Retrieved from fortune.com: http://fortune.com/2015/08/10/ubiquiti-networks-email-scam-40-million/
