Social Engineering Attack: How To Prevent It And Secure Your Business
With further technological advancement, the businesses have turned to more sophisticated security measures to protect their system and data. Of course, one of the biggest dangers to a cybersecurity does not rely on exploiting the technical areas but through deception in human behavior. Social engineering attacks, therefore take the guise of any cybercrime that targets not the system but people themselves, exploiting human trust, emotions, and psychological triggers for unauthorized entry into sensitive information.
Social engineering is a frightening, increasing threat against businesses small or large. Sometimes it presents as an email phishing scam and sometimes in the form of a telephone call masquerading as something it’s not. The trusty employee can subvert even the most secure protection systems. Let’s talk about some of the most common types of social engineering attacks, how they work, and how organisations can defend themselves against them in today’s blog.
What Are Social Engineering Attacks?
Social engineering attacks against humans serve as a type of attack that achieves this by tricking them to provide confidential data such as login credentials, bank account details, or personal information. This is quite different from the conventional hacking malware cyberattacks as it instead focuses on general human behavior, like trust, curiosity, fear, or sense of urgency, rather than depending on technical skills and vulnerabilities.
Main objective: Social engineering tries to gain access to confidential data or systems, even by convincing the victim to do something, like opening a malicious link, downloading malware, or divulging confidential information. The attacks can come in multiple forms, like email and telephone to social media and even person to person.
Common Forms of Social Engineering Attacks
1. Phishing
Phishing is one of the most pre-eminent types of social engineering attacks. It usually is the case in fraudulent e-mails, which are written to mirror real e-mails as closely as possible and bait the recipient into clicking a link or downloading an attachment. Once the victim agrees, malware can be installed into their device, or they might be forwarded to another site for which they do not know it to be a fake and unwittingly give login information or even credit card numbers.
Spear Phishing: Targeted phishing. In this attack, the message is not transmitted to the entire world but narrowed down to one particular person or organization. Personalizing the message to look legitimate. Using social media or other information sources where data about a victim exists, an email can appear that much more authentic.
2. Vishing (Voice Phishing)
Vishing: The process in which the attackers utilize a call in order to fool the victim by revealing sensitive information. In this case, attackers will disguise themselves as a genuine organization like a bank, government agencies, or an IT department. They sometimes ask victims to authenticate their identity, give them their banking details, or even change their passwords. Unlike email phishing, vishing does its work through verbal conversations and makes it hard to detect using traditional modes of cybersecurity.
3. Baiting
Baiting attacks attract a victim by offering something attractive, such as free software, a gift card, or exclusive content. Traditionally, “bait” is something attractive to human curiosity and greed. For example, the hacker would put a malware-infected computer USB drive in public access where people may end up finding it and stick it into their computers with some attractiveness labeled on it as “Confidential” or “Salary Reports.” As soon as one person sticks the USB drive into his computer, he installs the malware automatically.
4. Pretexting
Pretexting This is the fictitious occurrence created for the purpose of deception, such that victims are tricked into divulging information or otherwise providing access to sensitive systems. The pretender pretends to be a person in authority, such as a colleague, an IT support technician, or maybe a law enforcement officer. They will request some personal information, login credentials or demand that the victim act on their behalf as instructed and supposedly by request from a legitimate source.
The phishing attack relies on time or fear whereas pretexting more relies on building a relationship over time because it draws out information gradually.
5. Quid Pro Quo
A quid pro quo attack is an attack with social engineering through which the attacker offers some kind of benefit to the target person in lieu of information or access. For example, a quid pro quo attack could assume the form of a person, who is pretending to be a tech support and claims to correct some problem which would require login credentials. Quid pro quo attacks can occur online or offline.
6. Tailgating (Piggybacking)
Tailgating is the physical form of social engineering whereby an unauthorized person gains access to a secure area by following behind the authorized user through shadowing of the authorized user. For instance, one such attack would be when an attacker hides by the access-controlled door and traces the same person behind the access-controlled door while pretending to have forgotten his access card, upon somebody approaching to open it using his access card. Such an attack would compromise even security systems that ensure physical security and leaves open areas protected by biometrics and access-control systems vulnerable to unauthorized users.
How Social Engineering Attacks Work
The social engineering attacks work because of preying on human psychology and behavior. The attacker carefully devises his strategy using human tendencies. There is trust: People believe a message more if it is coming from someone they know or can trust, be it a colleague or even a company they know and are familiar with.
- Authority: They pose as some sort of authority such as a manager or those working in the IT department, officers from law enforcement, or even some pieces of law to coerce or bully the victim into compliance.
- Urgency: The most commonly used is the forcing of a sense of urgency in the brain of the recipient. For example, the scammer tries to rush the victim to take some action, given a specific time for the execution of it (example, “Your account will lock unless you give your login information”), when there is the least chance that the person you targeted will check up on the source of such a request.
- Curiosity: This creates the interest of users for suggesting something interesting or exclusive material (“Click here to see confidential company reports”) and makes a user click on malicious link or malware download.
- Greed: Several baits like free software, gift cards or money may make the victims ignore all risks involved, particularly in the baiting or quid pro quo attacks.
Social Engineering Attacks Effects
What Effects Does Social Engineering Attack Have?
Social engineering attacks may have tremendous detrimental effects on the victims. The victims may be either individuals or organizations. Among them include:
- Data breaches: Social engineering aids attackers gain unauthorized access to valuable customer information, financial reports, and intellectual properties.
- Financial loss: They can use such information to commit fraud or even steal money directly from organizations, which could be a heavy blow to businesses.
- Reputation Damage: An organization may come to the realization that a breach or attack occasioned by the outcomes of social engineering brings quite a lot of reputation damage alongside lost customers and de-valued trust.
- Operational Disruption: Malware-based attacks brought about through Social Engineering will disrupt business operations, thus costing time and potentially productivity.
- Legal and Regulatory Consequences: Organizations that fail to protect sensitive data may suffer the legal consequences and regulatory fines and undergo greater regulatory scrutiny by industry watchdogs.
How to Prevent Social Engineering Attacks
Prevention of social engineering attacks can be ensured through correctly informed employees, well-defined policies and procedures, and related technical controls. Some of the best practices that organizations can undertake to prevent these attacks include the following:.
1.Employee Training
Actual training is one of the best antidotes to these social engineering attacks. Your workers should be educated on various types of social engineering attacks, be aware of suspicious behavior, and know how to react. The contents that should be covered during the trainings are;
How to spot phishing emails: Teach the employees how to watch out for red flags that include spelling or grammar, attachment and sender address.
Verify sensitive information requests: The employees must verify the requests for sensitive information especially if the requests are unusual or urgent. For example, you would call the requesting party directly using a known phone number to confirm whether the request is valid.
Handling Unsolicited Telephone Calls: Employees must be cautious whenever they receive unsolicited calls that demand much information or access. Before attempting to implement the request, employees must first know who is calling.
2. Implement Strong Access Controls
The social engineering attack can be controlled by limiting access to sensitive data and systems. Access controls should, therefore, be put in place with multi-factor authentication to limit who can access organizations’ critical systems and information. Even if a user’s login credentials are compromised by an attacker, full privileges access would still be prevented with MFA.
3. Implement a Strong Security Policy
Preempt such attacks by developing a comprehensive cybersecurity policy. In such a policy, enable provisions for dealing with sensitive information, responding to suspicious communications, and reporting incidents that could lead to security problems. Update your security policies to inculcate the newest threats as well as let employees know about them.
4. Have regular security audits and simulations
Simulate social engineering attempts, for example, phishing tests, that expose your workers to different threat detection opportunities to enhance how they respond to them in a secure, controlled environment. Perform security audits and assessments which reveal the vulnerabilities within the system as well as those processes followed within your organization that you may take action about before the attacker does.
5. Offer email filtering and security tools
This can be achieved with the help of sophisticated email filtering tools that can prevent the phishing emails even from entering into the employees’ inboxes so that they cannot access the mail. These filtering tools in email can recognize the bad links and attachments, typical phishing attack suspects, thus reducing the extent of possibly allowing social engineering attacks against employees.
6. Foster a Culture of Watchfulness
It is extremely important to make a culture of vigilance when it comes to cybersecurity. Employees should be nudged to question, authenticate, and forward suspicious messages to the IT or security teams. This is best done by making them wary.
Conclusion
Social engineering attacks are a form of very dangerous though often unnoticed cyber security threat. Unlike other cyber attacks, social engineering attacks attack not psychology of people but their technology, which makes them hard to be discovered and prevented solely through technical controls. Businesses can minimize the threat associated with social engineering tactics by educating employees, developing strong security policies, and using security tools properly.
As a proactive response towards cybersecurity in the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape of today, this is therefore quite critical. Building awareness and fostering security-conscious culture can go a long way in protecting many forms of social engineering attacks against your organization.