Virus and Social Engineering (part 1)

How Viruses Are Sent and how to Protect yourself

What is Virus and Social Engineering ?

We can say that viruses are malicious software that disrupts the working flow of a computer and can gain access with or without the user's permission . In this topic, let's explain this situation in detail with social engineering, which is one of the ways viruses are transferred to the victim. Social engineering is the attempt to deceive or defraud a person psychologically , whether consciously or unconsciously , in order to obtain the desired information

How Are Viruses Sent ?

Viruses can infect people's systems due to unknown applications , unconfirmed links or various reasons. Through social engineering , a hacker can send the virus to his victim with a text such as " Click for the Giveaway " or any other social engineering scenario that may interest him.

These types of attacks are generally carried out via SMS, Email and Instagram etc . Nowadays, many of us have spam blockers on our phones. It allows you to block malicious SMS messages sent to you. In this way, you can be protected from both fraudsters and viruses. For Instagram, instead of spam blockers, you can manually filter who can send messages to your account through privacy settings.

You should know that artificial intelligence cannot be compared with the social engineering techniques that are emerging day by day . In short, viruses are software that can be sent from social networking sites, e-mails, SMS or any other interactive environment. Apart from these, you should also consider the possibility that files you download from various sites under the name " Unknown Source " may also contain viruses.

How to protect yourself against viruses

Frankly, if viruses are sent to you through social engineering, we have very little escape . If you are using a platform that scans malicious links through the settings provided to us about who can send us messages, turning on settings like these will take you one step forward . Apart from these, you can scan the links from virus scanning sites.

The links sent to you may have been sent by your most trusted friend or even by someone else.

You should pay attention to domains , for example instagram.com and lnstagram.com let me explain the difference here.

 When we look at the instagram.com domain, there is no problem with the extension (.com), the same thing applies to lnstagram.com , but if such methods are used at the beginning of the domain named lnstagram.com (there is a small L, not an I), you may be caught in the trap and get infected with the virus.

Most Cheat or hacked games apk files downloaded from the internet contain viruses. You should be careful not to download any files from such websites. You should pay attention to e-mails coming from official institutions or platforms where you are registered .

I hope you learnt something from today's topic. Part 2 (How Viruses are sent via Social Engineering) Will be posted in next post.. Watch out !! TheBAG