In online social networking platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram etc, hundreds of millions of users makes unknown persons as friends, interacts with peoples and shares huge volume of personal information without concerning about their data security. Some group of peoples attains profit with this private data received from the users and this profit will motivate the groups to lawlessly obtain private information’s further. The practice of gypping people for sharing sensitive and confidential information is called social engineering. The cyber-security threat that have been evolved and broadened in scope over the decade is social engineering, which continued to be a growing attack vector for the diffusion of malicious programs with the use of online communication tools like skype, e-mail, linkedin, dropbox etc, in various business environments resulting in decrease in personal interaction between people. Regarding e-mail threat, SMS-based second factor authentication served as the mainspring for email service providers, online markets, financial institutions and over social networks. But the attackers use deceitful tricks and persuade users to share sensitive information like authentication codes using social engineering techniques, because humans easily trust each other and disclose personal information, thus making them more endangered to social engineering attacks. Due to plenty availability of sensors and services like SMS, Bluetooth etc, smartphone is the most commonly used interactive device for sharing links, files resulting in advanced persistent threat by attackers. In this paper we are going to study various techniques used to solve social engineering cyber-crime threat in different areas.

Keywords: advanced persistent threat, attack vector, confidential information, cyber-security threat, malicious programs, online communication tools, smartphone, social engineering, social networking platforms.