Social engineering and social networks and their impact on the Arab society

Document Type : Original Article

Author

قسم المکتبات جامعة بنى سويف

Abstract

The present study aims at recognizing to extreme the Arab community is
aware of how to protect their personal accounts and ways of penetration
(hacking) of privacy on general level and focusing on social engineering on
particular. In addition to other available ways of training of the digital citizen. The
concept of social engineering (the art of penetrating minds), the significance of of
social networks in the Arab world, and the importance of privacy from the point of
view of social networks’ users in the Arab world, as well as recognizing ways of
social networks penetration and ways of social engineering protection . So we
can point out that the Arab community awareness of social engineering is one of
its priorities for protecting their accounts in all social networks and the required
skills to prevent attacks of this social engineering in all social networks.
A sample of 336 individuals was applied to the current study. The study
also comes up with the following results: positively, individuals of the academic
community succeeded at protecting their personal data automatically and at a
high rate. Selection of fake names constitutes half of the academic community (
53.2%), who use social networks and this is explored by their deny of personal
data or by writing fake personal data. In addition to hacking their banking
accounts since 6.8% of the individuals were slightly hacked. One of the most
common methods of social engineering attacks are spam messages sent by a
friend as congratulations (77.1%), followed by 53.2% who are convinced by the
significance of programs to be downloaded, the importance of social networks in
the Arab world, the importance of privacy from users’ point of view of social
networks in the Arab world, as well as the identification of penetrate ways of the
social networks and how to be protected from social engineering.


Keywords