Analysis of Social Engineering Threats with Attack Graphs

Social engineering is the acquisition of information about computer systems through non-technical means. While technical security of most critical systems is high, these systems remain vulnerable to attacks from social engineers. Social engineering is a technique that: (a) does not require any (advanced) technical tools, (b) can be used by anyone, (c) is cheap. While some research exists for classifying and analysing social engineering attacks, the integration of social engineering attackers with other attackers such as software or network ones is missing so far. In this paper, we propose to consider social engineering exploits together with technical vulnerabilities. We introduce a method for the integration of social engineering exploits into attack graphs and propose a simple quantitative analysis of the graphs that helps to develop a comprehensive defensive strategy