The Nigerian prince has been around for decades now. The scamming chain mail allegedly coming from Nigeria about a prince who’s asking for your help is legendary. It is one of the best examples of social engineering hacking in the history of the internet. Take a look at this link for more information about it.
Thousands, if not millions of people fell for the scam. If you don’t want to be a part of the statistics for this trick, you should learn from their ways. Or, if you’re not too good at learning, you can call the professionals who know exactly what needs to be done.
Blocking email addresses, going through detailed searches to find the source of the scam, and other methods are being used. However, the best thing is to know if something like this is happening and not fall for them.
There are four stages of social engineering hacking
Every scam on the internet that is a part of social engineering has four main stages. Those are the identification of the victim, throwing bait to see if they are available, working to get the needed information, and getting a clean exit out of the situation. See this link for more information on social engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security).
Let’s look at them a little more thoroughly and learn how to recognize them:
1. Identification
The hackers won’t go for anyone. They first go through their social media, browser information, etc. If they identify the victim as eligible for their scams, they’ll jump in and attack. If not, they’ll go for someone else. This is how they might use an email from someone that seems familiar to the victim.
2. Throwing a bait
Once they have got all the information, the attacker is going to come up with a plot for their story. It doesn’t have to be a scheme or a pattern that is similar to the Nigerian Prince we mentioned previously.
Depending on what the attacker finds as information, they will think of an adequate strategy. They might create a family emergency, or something similar. This is the bait. They will wait to see if the pray catches the hook.
3. Getting the information
One of the lately most popular scamming messages is the stranger who’s texting the mom of a child that has been hit by a car. Before they know it, the victim transferred money to a total stranger hacker.
That’s how they are getting the needed information. There are tons of strategies that attackers use. Some are better than others in a particular situation. There’s no one-size-fits-all scam. The attackers need to work around to get the best result.
4. Getting out
When they have enough information, they will simply vanish. When the attacker got what they need, you’ll be left in question marks. It may be the credit card credentials, access to an inside network, or other types of info. When they have it, they’ll cover the tracks that lead to them, and will disappear without ever knowing who did the scam to you.
Emotions play the entire role
As you can see, there are lots of social engineering tactics and it takes a lot of experience to understand that someone is trying to scam you. People on the internet always think that they’ve seen all the tricks, but it turns out that this is not always the case.
We’re online almost non-stop. We come across various unknown situations daily. We open websites that we have never seen before, and this is a perfect ground for hackers to get to our attention. If the emails don’t work for you, and you never take stranger messages seriously, then they’ll come up with a scam on social media.
This is also possible. The key part in all of them is the emotional factor. The hackers always play on the card of emotions, so you’ll be spun with a story that is supposed to create a feeling of reality, while it is not.
Make sure you avoid these situations in which something may be a scam. Always double-check your actions, and never hand over your personal information to third parties that are not well-known in the world of the internet. Don’t trust small eCommerce pages that ask for your credit number.
