Social Engineering Attacks and Countermeasures in the New Zealand Banking System: Advancing a User-reflective Mitigation Model

Date
2018
Authors
Airehrour, D
Nair, NV
Madanian, S
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract

Social engineering attacks are possibly one of the most dangerous forms of security and privacy attacks since they are technically oriented to psychological manipulation and have been growing in frequency with no end in sight. This research study assessed the major aspects and underlying concepts of social engineering attacks and their influence in the New Zealand banking sector. The study further identified attack stages and provided a user-reflective model for the mitigation of attacks at every stage of the social engineering attack cycle. The outcome of this research was a model that provides users with a process of having a reflective stance while engaging in online activities. Our model is proposed to aid users and, of course, financial institutions to re-think their anti-social engineering strategies while constantly maintaining a self-reflective assessment of whether they are being subjected to social engineering attacks while transacting online.

Description
Keywords
Social engineering attack; Cyber-attacks; Phishing; Malware; New Zealand; Banking
Source
Information, 9(5), 110. MDPI AG. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/info9050110
Rights statement
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).