12-02-2025
18:17
Social Engineering
Social engineering refers to manipulating a user to make a mistake. Examples, of such mistakes can include sharing a password, opening a malicious file, and approving a payment.
The target of these attacks are human beings, not computer systems.
Consequently, the attack relies on psychological tricks to get the target user to cooperate. Such as urgency, curiosity, and authority. "human hacking".
Phishing
Phishing is a subset of social engineering in which the communication medium is mostly messages. At one point, the most common phishing attacks happened via email; however, the spread of smartphones, along with ubiquitous Internet access, has spread phishing to short text messages (smishing), voice calls (vishing), QR codes (quishing), and social media direct messages. Purpose is to make the target user click, open, or reply to a message so that the attacker can steal information, money or access.
