Social Engineering: Cyber Love gone Phishing Intel

January 13, 2019
Social Engineering: Cyber Love gone Phishing Intel

Most users nowadays are still not aware that Social Engineering is dangerous and rampant as ever. It is a technique still being utilized by cyber criminals and intelligence agents. Yes, that’s right Intelligence Officers are trained to be good at it in order to phish for information.

In this digital age, the medium of communication has expanded that it made the world smaller, thus giving opportunity to both black hat and white hack cyber citizens, which is of course bad for those who are clueless digital users.

Stepping up the game

Now, to step up the game or maybe a new low to some, Social Engineering is also now being used in the military against their enemies and targets alike of course. Why? Because human nature, and the need of a human being to connect and be intimate with each other is part of our humanity. Therefore, that psychological and physiological attribute oi being human can be exploited by anyone who knows how to make connections with another person.

How it was used in the military

Now that we mentioned it, yes it is a current method at least known to be used by Hamas against Israeli soldiers. These two factions are still at not so good terms with each other.

It even escalated to a cyber-physiological war where Hamas is reportedly phishing for information by creating fake female Israeli immigrant accounts used in Social Media to contact mostly male soldiers.

Once contact has been made, the fake account will do its best to lure the victim downloading a fake mobile apps with names like GlanceLove and some of them features scores and goals from the World Cup, such as the Golden Cup.

Payload

The fake dating applications were known to be harmful and malicious, on top of that the attempt of extracting confidential information from the soldiers is not a joke. This can certainly jeopardize a top secret mission or just a plain mission and cost more lives than fortune.

This is one old trick yet a genius attempt to use it in today’s digital era.

What can be done?

It is said that the IT Security of the Israeli military has updated their guidelines. It has also deployed an Anti-Phishing campaign through internal simulations to raise awareness. At this point in the age of cybersecurity the need to invest in a phishing intelligence team is a must.

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