TOWN AND COUNTRY, Mo. (KMOX) — A 'social engineering' experiment at Maryville University revealed many of its students need to be more skeptical about technology. Students at the Cyber Fusion Center coded USB stick drives and put a label on them saying 'insert me into a computer!' Then scattered the drives across campus.
Related: Biggest cybersecurity risk may be lack of qualified talent You'd think students would be tech-savvy, but Tegan Chin says about half of them wound up inserting the flash drives and clicking the files that were labeled with something that would entice students to open then, like "McNally Hidden Room" or "Finance Mid-Term Answers." Much to their chagrin, that only opened a flyer for an upcoming campus event. But what if the file was a virus instead? A hacker would have a 50% success rate. Chin says "social engineering," or trying to fool the user, is becoming a more popular way to take advantage of people on the Internet. She says many company I.T. departments now have rules about plugging in outside devices, even if the employee supposedly knows where it came from.
© 2019 KMOX (Entercom). All rights reserved.
