ITPEC FE Morning October 2022 Question 41

Social Engineering — tricking people into revealing confidential information.

An attacker calls the help desk pretending to be an employee who forgot their password. The staff resets it to a default, and the attacker uses it to access the network.

Answer: d) Social engineering

• •Social engineering — manipulating people (not systems) to gain unauthorized access
• •The attacker exploits human trust, not a technical vulnerability

Why not others:
- (a) Buffer overflow — exploits memory allocation flaws in software
- (b) Denial-of-Service — floods a service with traffic to make it unavailable
- (c) Shoulder surfing — physically observing someone entering sensitive data

Key rule: If the attack relies on deceiving a person rather than exploiting code or infrastructure, it is social engineering.

AI-generated — may contain errors