Passive and Active Reconnaissance: A Social Engineering Case Study

Love scams, online scams and how absurd as it may seem, still causes people to lose their money. This issue happens because some people are still susceptible to social engineering. Our investigation attempts to find out how people could be exploited for this type of social engineering attack on social media. Social engineering could be categorized into passive and active reconnaissance. Our experiment involves individuals such as UNITEN students and Instafamous to find out if such attempts would deceive them. The methodology proposed is the attack cycle that consists of four steps: information gathering, establishing relationship and rapport, exploitation, and execution. This case study will also explore the possible uses of valuable information of target that can be gathered based on passive and active reconnaissance.