ABSTRACT

CYBER THREAT AWARENESS

Nowadays, Social Engineering (SE) attacks are posing one of the most significant risks for cybersecurity. Indeed, the analysis of the new attack strategies clearly shows how cybercriminals increasingly tend to exploit vulnerabilities introduced by human factors to perform cyber-attacks. While SE is a well-known method for deception used for a very long time, its evolution in the past years has been dramatically changing the current attack landscape, and it will heavily influence future scenarios. The evolution of SE attacks is rooted in socio-economic and technological factors. On the one hand, current society transformations are characterized by a model of “immersed humans”, where physical and virtual meetings seamlessly merge, thanks to mobile and ubiquitous terminals. In working contexts, employees can complete a task in any possible place, leading to an inevitable blending between private and professional lives. Furthermore, the advent of online social networks has been heavily affecting people-sharing habits, creating a proliferation of digital identities available on the Internet. On the other hand, new technologies have been enabling more sophisticated SE attacks, i.e. advanced automatic methods to gather and elaborate information needed to carefully select the “victims”. All these factors contributed to the evolution of SE into a new multifaceted phenomenon that goes under the name of Social Engineering 2.0, which increases the number of potential victims directly exposed on the Internet.