Question

What is Social Engineering and how can you detect it.

Answer 1

Answer:

Social engineering is the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information. The types of information these criminals are seeking can vary, but when individuals are targeted the criminals are usually trying to trick you into giving them your passwords or bank information, or access your computer to secretly install malicious software–that will give them access to your passwords and bank information as well as giving them control over your computer.
Social engineering is a popular tactic among hackers because it is often easier to exploit users' weaknesses than it is to find a network or software vulnerability. Hackers will often use social engineering tactics as a first step in a larger campaign to infiltrate a system or network and steal sensitive data or disperse malware.
Types of social engineering attacks :

• Baiting
• Phishing
• Spear Phishing
• Vishing
• Pretexting
• Scareware
• water-holing
• Diversion theft
• Honey trap
• Rogue

How you can detect:
Attackers are increasingly infecting computers by tricking people into doing it themselves:

• 99.7% of documents that were used in attachment-based campaigns relied on social engineering and macros.
• 98% of URLs in malicious messages linked to hosted malware.

On social media, phishing is 10 times more likely than malware:

• Phishing is the fastest growing social media threat, mainly due to the fact that creating fake social media accounts for known brands is so easy.
• 40% of accounts that claim to be Fortune 100 companies on Facebook are unauthorized accounts.
• 20% of Twitter accounts for Fortune 100 companies are unauthorized.

Malicious Mobile Apps are a rising trend:

• Email and social media aren’t the only ways that social engineers are targeting people.
• More than 2 billion malicious mobile apps have been willingly downloaded.
• There have been over 12,000 malicious mobile apps discovered in app stores alone.

Note:

I have taken this answer from below links hope you will visit and learn from it.

1. https://www.webroot.com/ie/en/resources/tips-articles/what-is-social-engineering

2. https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/social-engineering

3. http://proserveit.com/social-engineering-attack-how-to-detect-prevent/