Abstract
Social engineering has posed a serious threat to cyberspace security. To protect against social engineering attacks, a fundamental work is to know what constitutes social engineering. This paper first develops a domain ontology of social engineering in cybersecurity and conducts ontology evaluation by its knowledge graph application. The domain ontology defines 11 concepts of core entities that significantly constitute or affect social engineering domain, together with 22 kinds of relations describing how these entities related to each other. It provides a formal and explicit knowledge schema to understand, analyze, reuse and share domain knowledge of social engineering. Furthermore, this paper builds a knowledge graph based on 15 social engineering attack incidents and scenarios. 7 knowledge graph application examples (in 6 analysis patterns) demonstrate that the ontology together with knowledge graph is useful to 1) understand and analyze social engineering attack scenario and incident, 2) find the top ranked social engineering threat elements (e.g. the most exploited human vulnerabilities and most used attack mediums), 3) find potential social engineering threats to victims, 4) find potential targets for social engineering attackers, 5) find potential attack paths from specific attacker to specific target, and 6) analyze the same origin attacks.
Highlights
In the context of cybersecurity, social engineering describes a type of attack in which the attacker exploit human vulnerabilities to breach the security goals of cyberspace elements
2) For some attack scenarios, social engineering can be as simple as making a phone call and impersonating an insider to elicit the classified information
3) Especially in past decades when defense mainly focus on the digital domain yet overlooks human factors in security
Summary
In the context of cybersecurity, social engineering describes a type of attack in which the attacker exploit human vulnerabilities (by means such as influence, persuasion, deception, manipulation and inducing) to breach the security goals (such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, controllability and auditability) of cyberspace elements (such as infrastructure, data, resource, user and operation). Social engineering is a type of attack wherein the attacker exploit human vulnerability through social interaction to breach cyberspace security (Wang et al 2020). Many distinctive features make social engineering to be a quite popular attack in hacker community and a serious, universal and persistent threat to cyber security. As the development of security technology, classical attacks become harder and more and more attackers turn to social engineering. Social engineering threat is increasingly serious along with its evolution in new technical and cyber environment. Largescale, robotic, automated and advanced social engineering attack is becoming possible (Wang et al 2020)
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