This study explores the psychological aspects of social engineering by analyzing personality traits in the context of spear-phishing attacks. Phishing emails were constructed by leveraging multiple vulnerable personality traits to maximize the success of an attack. The emails were then used to test several hypotheses regarding phishing susceptibility by simulating a series of spear-phishing campaigns inside a software development company. The company's employees underwent a standard Big Five personality test, four different phishing emails over four weeks, and cybersecurity training. The results were aggregated before and after the cybersecurity course, and binary logistic regression analyses were performed at each phase of the phishing attack. The results show that personality traits correlate with phishing susceptibility under certain circumstances and pave the way for new methods of protecting individuals from phishing attacks.

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Social engineering is one of the biggest challenges facing network security because it exploits the natural human tendency to trust. In recent years, cybercriminals have done everything in their power to be innovative. They are taking advantage of every aspect of our lives to develop new social engineering schemes. This paper provides an in-depth survey about the social engineering attacks that took place in Romania in 2019, their classifications, detection strategies, and prevention procedures.

Once with the development of WEB technologies, more attention has been paid to information originated from Internet websites being complementary to information obtained from other sources of interest. Specialized structures have been set up to collect, analyze and capitalize this information, theoretically and methodologically based on concepts and principles. Thus, definitions have been formulated for what Open Source Information (OSINF) and open-source intelligence (OSINT) are. This paper presents the stages and technological methods applied for an informational attack.

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