SocialSec is an educational Chrome extension, developed as a Capstone project at Arizona State University, that detects and prevents a Social Engineering attack using publicly available information.

The Social Engineering attack, as the name implies, is an attack that makes use of common-sense people’s tendency to share personal information. Whether it’s their birthdate, significant others’ names, or even their children’s names, people have a habit of sharing this type of information with the world. The idea is that a hacker, having access to this data, can create a Social Engineering attack by crafting the information and combining it with a password that they already have access to, thus allowing them to log in to an account.

The way this works is that a hacker is able to create a wordlist based on publicly available data, which includes information such as: birthdates, anniversary dates, children’s names, relationships, hometowns, gender, etc.

Once they have this information, they have the ability to create a wordlist based on the passwords that you are currently using or trying to create.

If there is a match between your wordlist and the password, SocialSec will let you know what action you can take.

You can access the SocialSec Extension for Chrome by following the link to your Google account.