Be Careful! Often Getting Calls I'm Not Clear Can Be Pretexting, What's That?

Illustration of phishing messages (photo: unsplash)

JAKARTA - Anyone who has a cell phone or other phone must have experienced contact by an unknown person, who pretended to contact you for certain reasons. It is called Pretexting.

Launching Makeuseof, Pretexting is a form of social engineering, which occurs when a hacker uses trickery to try and gain access to any system, network, or information.

Maybe we often encounter this fraudulent model of pretending to be someone, especially in Indonesia. Where the perpetrator pretends to know us and asks for credit or money transfers. However, this case is a little different from pretexting.

Here, the perpetrator will use a scenario or false pretext, which pretends to be an experienced person, such as IT personnel, HR managers, or even government agencies, which are done online or directly.

In this case, there are two important elements used. First, the character in which the perpetrator will pretend to be a character, and the second is the situation. The perpetrator will create a situation as deep as possible to trick the victim.

Pretexting takes advantage of weaknesses in identity verification. These methods include requesting verification of birth dates, closest relatives, number of descendants, contact addresses, the name of the mother's girl, or account numbers.

Most of this information can be obtained online from target social media accounts. Pretexters (pretexting actors) use this information to "evidence" the authenticity of their characters.

If the perpetrator manages to trick you, it will make you disclose more sensitive information they can use.

There are various techniques that fraudsters and hackers use to gain access to sensitive information, including:

This technique is very similar. Vishing's attack involved using voice calls to persuade victims to provide the information needed by scammers. Meanwhile, smishing uses SMS or text messages.

Vishing's technique tends to have higher chance of success as victims will usually ignore text messages than direct calls from apparently important personnel.

This bait technique usually involves using large prizes to gather information and can also include falsifying trusted sources.

For example, the perpetrators will pretend to be bank workers who give gifts to you as the customers who are most diligent in saving, then they will ask for your sensitive data as an excuse to confirm your truth as a customer and send gifts.

In this method, hackers use fear as a tactic. An important example is pop-ups on insecure sites, telling you that there is a virus on your device and then asking you to download an antiviral program that is actually malware. Scareware can also be distributed using email and links in text messages.