A literature survey on social engineering attacks: Phishing attack

Abstract

Phishing is a network type attack where the attacker creates the fake of an existing webpage to fool an online user into elicit personal Information. The prime objective of this review is to do literature survey on social engineering attack: Phishing attack and techniques to detect attack. Phishing is the combination of social engineering and technical methods to convince the user to reveal their personal data. The paper discusses about the Phishing social engineering attack theoretically and their issues in the life of human Beings. Phishing is typically carried out by Email spoofing or instant messaging. It targets the user who has no knowledge about social engineering attacks, and internet security, like persons who do not take care of privacy of their accounts details such as Facebook, Gmail, credit banks accounts and other financial accounts. The paper discusses various types of Phishing attacks such as Tab-napping, spoofing emails, Trojan horse, hacking and how to prevent them. At the same time this paper also provides different techniques to detect these attacks so that they can be easily dealt with in case one of them occurs. The paper gives a thorough analysis of various Phishing attacks along with their advantages and disadvantages.