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How to defeat social engineering attacks

“Phishing is more of a thing now because many people have turned to a criminal life and because Covid is a very successful phishing lure. We are all stretched thin, and as a result, we can make more security mistakes.”

If you have heard of the process of social engineering, the ability of a hacker to trick you into divulging your private details, then you might have come across ethical hacker Rachel Tobac. She's the CEO of SocialProof Security and board member of Women in Security and Privacy. I virtually attended one of her more recent talks, during which she explained her craft and gave some suggestions on how we all can improve our personal security and make her job more difficult.

Tobac has carried out some notable security stunts in the past, such as live hacking a CNN report's accounts and stealing his airline points. “I hack so people can understand how hackers think and hopefully you will avoid these mistakes,” she told her audience. 

During her talk, she showed the video of this exploit and then reviewed her tradecraft. In that particular incident, she didn’t talk to the reporter directly but leveraged information she had collected from public sources such as his birthday, email address, and postal address. By using a voice changer app and spoofing his phone number, Tobac was able to obtain more information and eventually transferred thousands of airline points to her own account.

Tobac’s talk is timely, because as she says, “Phishing is more of a thing now because many people have turned to a criminal life and because Covid is a very successful phishing lure. We are all stretched thin, and as a result, we can make more security mistakes.”

Object-Oriented Data Model

The real-world problems are more closely represented through the object-oriented data model. In this model, both the data and relationship are present in a single structure known as an object. We can store audio, video, images, etc in the database which was not possible in the relational model(although you can store audio and video in relational database, it is adviced not to store in the relational database). In this model, two are more objects are connected through links. We use this link to relate one object to other objects. This can be understood by the example given below.