Social engineering in information assurance curricula

With the increasing use of security technology, technical attacks should become more difficult leading attackers to employ social engineering as a means to obtaining unauthorized access to information. Therefore, social engineering is a potentially dangerous threat to information security. Fortunately, a number of countermeasures have been proposed to defend against it. These countermeasures include implementing policy, providing end-user and key personnel education, and performing security audits. However, most current prominent information assurance curricula do not directly address social engineering and only indirectly address the countermeasures. Amending these curricula to include social engineering as a topic may help students be better prepared for encountering social engineering threats.