Cybersecurity Capabilities in Developing Nations and Its Impact on Global Security: A Survey of Social Engineering Attacks and Steps for Mitigation of These Attacks

Introduction

Developing countries have perceived numerous technological developments in the previous decade. Although countries are beneficial and progressive, they can cause unsafe mobile devices and system networks and even the internet of things devices, which leads to security weaknesses that can cause rippling impacts in society. While it is vital to understand that researchers may attempt to find the most appropriate solutions, ineffective implementation and the negative utility of technology happen in the creation of current security threats to the different types of users. Cyberspace is developing at a rapid speed unprecedented by any other kind of commodity. Approximately three billion individuals are now linked in the identified cyberspace via the whole internet, which is a figure that is developing quite fast and is estimated to grow even more (Das, 2017).

As most of these levels of growth take place in the emerging economies, it is not a surprise that the identified development society is pondering how to leverage the various advantages accruing from the identified utility of cyberspace and ICT via cyber capacity building. However, the research will be futile if it is not backed up by a comprehensive discussion regarding the need to address all these issues posed by the identified proliferation of ICT infrastructure and internet applications for the identified sustainable advancement (Lindsay et al., 2015). In contemporary networks, social media attacks are overgrowing, and, as a result, the cyber safety chain is being disrupted. People are being manipulated into divulging critical and confidential data to businesses and others in the interests of cybercriminals (Kalnins et al., 2017). Social engineering threatens a network’s protection regardless of its firewall robustness, encryption methods, intrusion detection, and antivirus software systems.

In contrast, as opposed to machines or technology, people are more likely to trust other people. As a result of such human interactions, assaults on social engineering are the most effective as they can be used to attack all systems and networks. Software or hardware systems cannot avoid these attacks until professionals and system developers are trained to avoid them. In the case of a network with no technical vulnerabilities, cybercriminals choose social engineering assaults (Aroyo et al., 2018). The assaults of social engineering are one of the world’s most disturbing security challenges. America had the most extensive intrusion, preceded by Germany and Japan, with the most social engineering attacks. Therefore, in the security chain, humans are the weakest link. Malicious activities performed by human interactions psychologically influence a person to divulge confidential data or breach safety procedures (Pokrovskaia & Snisarenko, 2017).

American companies are more targeted and influenced by cybercriminals and hackers worldwide, with an estimated $121.22 billion in losses through these means. Such companies manage important, valuable international data, and, when compromised, the world economy and safety can be severely affected (Arana, 2017). For instance, in 2018, Equifax had been compromised for several months and lost sensitive customer data. Equifax is a consumer credit reporting and monitoring service that aggregates personal data and customer data to manage credit history and fraud prevention. As a result of the data breach, 145.5 million American consumers had their personal information compromised (Chargo, 2018).) The data contained full names, dates of birth, unique government identifications, driver license details, home addresses, contact details, credit card information, and credit ratings. The infringement was triggered by a phishing attack of hundreds of emails supposedly by institutions like Bank of America (Chargo, 2018). An intrusion launched by cyber attackers is of great concern to consumers in Equifax (Chargo, 2018). The Central Bank has announced a more recent cybersecurity assault, where an intruder stole over $80 million from a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) system on computers from the bank (Libicki, 2018). The following research paper brings together comprehensively researched chapters and case studies on the systems security approaches and the current techniques to identify and overcome technological weaknesses as more emphasis is focused on the developing nations.