Social engineering

Now, we have looked at other videos about how people can physically hack your computer, access through the internet, put things onto your computer, but social engineering is a term where the person trying to commit the crime is actually contacting you and they might well just phone you up to pose as your Internet provider. So what they might be doing is saying that there is a problem with your Internet or that you need to upgrade your Internet and they may well ask you to do things. One of them may well be to directly work with your router and your router is the main box where your internet is coming in. And they might ask you to give codes and reference numbers of that router. Now, this is not a normal thing to happen. If you are not sure about any call you get from a company, the best thing you can do is hang up, phone the actual company up and tell them you have had a call, is it right or wrong? And they will normally tell you they would not make just a cold call like that. So to start with, if anyone does phone you up asking for information, be suspicious.

Now, what they are trying to do when they are accessing your router is they are trying to get the settings on the router so that they can directly control your Internet, so they can see what you are up to. So, it's really important you do not give away data like that. Another thing they can do is start gaining information about you. So they are getting personal information from social media posts or whatever, but then contacting you to say they are from another company. Now you might hear some of these stories from the news where it might be a bank supposedly phoning up somebody. They have got all the key information, they may even have their bank details. And what they are doing is they are trying to encourage you to make a bank transfer, because they might say that your current account or your savings account is at threat, so they have opened up another account for you, you need to transfer the money over to this different account number. Now, no bank is going to do that, so be really cautious about any phone calls or communication you get from outside organisations that say they are from a financial institution or a company and they are not actually, you are not sure about it, or you have not asked for them to contact you.

Now, this type of fraud is sometimes very, very difficult to pick up because sometimes people answer the phone and they just want to be friendly with people and they just assume everything's absolutely fine. But you need to be very, very careful of any... Giving any information out on the phone. So if this happens to you, you do get someone to contact you, hang up from them, call up the company direct, tell them exactly what's happened, what time the person phoned you and they will be able to look on their call logs to see whether anyone has genuinely phoned you. If it is a genuine phone call from one of the organisations, then they will have no problem you phoning up the company yourselves. But be careful of this. If someone phones up and says, "If you want to validate it, here's the number," they could be giving you a phone number to phone for your Internet provider, for example, which is actually a fake number. So, always use the number that is on your genuine bills or directly on the provider's website, just to make absolutely sure.

Now, other ways they can contact you can not only be through telephone calls, but it might be through emails. And it might seem to be a very genuine email sent from the original place with a link in, or it may well be a text message that you have received. And these could be all sorts of things. It may well be someone trying to access your information and take your identity or it may be just someone trying to get your credit card details and take money from you. Typically on at the minute is text messages from one of the main carrier companies saying that you have got a parcel that needs collecting, or they tried to deliver a parcel and now there is a charge on it. So, they are trying to get your credit card details off of you or your bank details with a bank transfer, because you want the parcel that's been... That's supposedly delivered. So if you do get any of these, you are not actually expecting anything, then again, contact the company directly. Do not go just clicking links on emails or answering, handing over information over the phone.