Saturday, August 6, 2016

See how quickly a social engineer can nab your account credentials

This time every year, a couple of ginormous cyber security conferences happen in Las Vegas. Thousands of hackers and information security geeks gather to attend the infamous DEF CON and Black Hat events. Some of the hacks that are revealed at these events each year will astound the average Internet user—including demonstrations of hacking a baby monitor, remotely shutting down an insulin pump, building a hacker drone, using a cell phone to hack a car, etc.

And let's face it, we are all Internet users now because most of our electronic devices are connected to the Internet. This is called the Internet of Things, or IoT.

The most common cyber attack vector employs social engineering techniques to get you to unwittingly execute malware that exploits some vulnerability in your system, allowing someone to remotely control the system or perhaps encrypt all your files and hold them for ransom, and other nefarious deeds.

Social engineers use deception to persuade you into giving up information that you should not be sharing. This is very easily achieved. Embedded in this Tech Insider article is a 10-minute real-world video to prove it: A hacker shows how you can take over someone's online account in minutes using nothing but a phone.

Watch this hacker steal a reporter's cellular account credentials and email address in only moments with one phone call to his cellular carrier.

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