Social Engineering and Cybersecurity:a Victimological Aspect

Introduction. Cybercrime is one of the most urgent problems in modern society. Quite frequently, perpetrators achieve their criminal goals through social engineering. The aim of the work is to identify methods of social engineering and develop measures to protect organizations and ordinary users from social engineering techniques. Materials and Methods. The author analyzes domestic and foreign scientific and educational publications, studies analytical reviews, methodological recommendations, and reference material on the topic under study, employs the method of modeling and forecasting. The methodological basis includes the approaches proposed by O. M. Vershinina, Yu. S. Nenakhova, O. A. Alexandrova and N. I. Starostenko. Results and Discussion. The concept and characteristics of social engineering are given, the main areas where it is applied are investigated, the stages of application of criminal social engineering are considered, a detailed analysis of the methods of using social engineering in the commission of cybercrimes is carried out, the main preventive measures from social engineering are developed for both organizations and citizens. Conclusions. Despite the fact that the state has recently been paying more and more attention to the fight against cybercrime, the analysis has shown that there are many ways of committing cybercrime through the use of social engineering. It is obvious that organizations and citizens need to know both about the techniques of social engineering and how to protect themselves from them.