Social Engineering is the art of exploiting human psychology, rather than technical hacking techniques, to gain access to buildings, systems or data.
Social Engineering exploitation therefore, is digital equivalent of locking your armored doors but leaving the keys on the door or willfully giving it out to an intruder through carelessness or ignorance. Intruders need not to stress themselves, but to just reach at the entrance, turn the nob and enter the building.
The main technique and common way many organizations employ in securing their networks and information to ward off attackers exploitation is to integrate complex programs, intrusion detection and prevention plans, into their state-of-the-art computer equipment with high-tech data encryption. As good as this may sound, it is not the most effective way of preventing attackers from gaining unauthorized entry into organizations secured assets.
Miscreants have employed means of bypassing advanced technical security systems entirely by attacking the systems or organizations at a possibly weak point. The weak link is identified as unsuspecting and or uninformed human operators of the systems.
Since the advent of Covid-19, working from home has been very common practice and many employees do not have access to the same security architectures they enjoy in their workplace. This also escalates the insecurity issue making Organizations more vulnerable and more and more prone to attacks through remote workers.