Establishing the Human Firewall: Reducing an Individual's Vulnerability to Social Engineering Attacks

Abstract

Hackers frequently use social engineering attacks to gain a foothold into a target network. This type of attack is a tremendous challenge to defend against, as the weakness lies in the human users, not in the technology. Thus far, methods for dealing with this threat have included establishing better security policies and educating users on the threat that exists. Existing techniques aren't working as evidenced by the fact that auditing agencies consider it a given that will be able to gain access via social engineering. The purpose of this research is to propose a better method of reducing an individual's vulnerability to social engineering attacks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2008
Accession Number
ADA487118

Entities

People

  • Jamison W. Scheeres

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Cognition
  • Commerce
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Information Security
  • Information Systems
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Personnel Management
  • Psychology
  • Schools
  • Security
  • Social Engineering
  • Social Psychology
  • Students
  • Systems Engineering
  • Training

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Strategic Security Studies