Rundong Yang^1,*, Kangfeng Zheng¹, Xiujuan Wang², Bin Wu¹, Chunhua Wu¹

Computer Systems Science and Engineering, Vol.47, No.2, pp. 2153-2170, 2023, DOI:10.32604/csse.2023.038917

Abstract Social engineering attacks are considered one of the most hazardous cyberattacks in cybersecurity, as human vulnerabilities are often the weakest link in the entire network. Such vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly susceptible to network security risks. Addressing the social engineering attack defense problem has been the focus of many studies. However, two main challenges hinder its successful resolution. Firstly, the vulnerabilities in social engineering attacks are unique due to multistage attacks, leading to incorrect social engineering defense strategies. Secondly, social engineering attacks are real-time, and the defense strategy algorithms based on gaming or reinforcement learning are too complex to make rapid… More >

Yichiet Aun^1,*, Ming-Lee Gan¹, Nur Haliza Binti Abdul Wahab², Goh Hock Guan¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.74, No.3, pp. 4917-4931, 2023, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2023.032373

Abstract In defense-in-depth, humans have always been the weakest link in cybersecurity. However, unlike common threats, social engineering poses vulnerabilities not directly quantifiable in penetration testing. Most skilled social engineers trick users into giving up information voluntarily through attacks like phishing and adware. Social Engineering (SE) in social media is structurally similar to regular posts but contains malicious intrinsic meaning within the sentence semantic. In this paper, a novel SE model is trained using a Recurrent Neural Network Long Short Term Memory (RNN-LSTM) to identify well-disguised SE threats in social media posts. We use a custom dataset crawled from hundreds of… More >