Social Engineering_
Train your employees to recognize and report manipulation tactics that cybercriminals operate by using enterprise grade security awareness technology & trainings.
Given enough time and resources, an attacker can use social engineering to trick anyone.
What’s more, the number of phishing attacks grew by 36% in 2018, and shows no signs of slowing down.
Without the immunization that cyber security education provides, employees are sure targets of increasingly skillful attackers and scammers.
Knowing what the threat looks like is the first step towards resilience.
Social engineering explained
In information security, social engineering includes many forms of psychological manipulation that attackers use on their victims. The objective is to get them to act against their better judgement so scammers or cybercriminals can take advantage of this.
Almost every social engineering attack involves a confidence trick that determines the victim to share confidential information, provide access to a system, or otherwise facilitate a malicious compromise.
Protect your company from social engineering attacks
As you’re reading this, bad actors are crafting better phishing emails and crafting new ways to reach their victims when they’re most vulnerable.
Their social engineering attacks come in wildly diverse forms, many of which people outside the infosec field have never heard of.
1. CEO Fraud
CEO fraud where scammers impersonate a company’s CEO or important decision-maker to trick employees to unauthorised money transfers. The FBI estimates losses of over $12 billion over the last 5 years for this type of attack alone.
2. Invoice Fraud
Invoice fraud is another trick that involves impersonation. Malicious actors pose as clients/suppliers and persuade victims to pay invoices into a bank account they control. The UK’s Action Fraud agency estimates payment fraud costs British SMEs a whooping £18.9bn.
3. Phishing/Smishing/Vishing
Phishing/Smishing/Vishing are all forms of psychological manipulation that involve gaining the victim’s trust so attackers can harvest personal, financial or security information. With mobile devices making it almost impossible to check URLs and distractions fragmenting our ability to focus, these tactics are still incredibly effective.
4. Spoofed websites
Spoofed banking websites fraud or websites in general (social networks, email services etc) are often part of social engineering attacks. Cyber crooks use them to collect financial and personal information they later use to defraud company or personal accounts.
5. Confidential Data Theft
Confidential data theft is sometimes a more prized objective for attackers than money. They can go after your employees to collect this sensitive information and then use if for extortion against them or senior executives.
6. Ransomware
Ransomware often gets deployed into companies because of social engineering tricks, such as persuading an employee to open a malicious email attachment triggered by curiosity.
There are a lot more scenarios that motivated hackers use and no one is unhackable but proper training helps tremendously!
Statistics show that
end users are 70% less likely to fall for a phishing attempt
after 12 months of training.
Teaching employees to recognize and report social engineering attacks effectively reduces your attack surface and promotes responsibility and accountability in your organization.
How Bit Sentinel helps you fight social engineering attacks
Technology can only go so far in terms of security. No matter what combination of tools you use, the human element and its unpredictability inevitably introduces vulnerabilities into your organization.
That’s why we constantly sharpen our skills with the best trainings in the world, so we can teach teams like yours how to effectively counteract these psychological deception tactics.
Our team can help you with:
- Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the data we collect from publicly available sources. We use this data to simulate social engineering scenarios and show in practice how an attacker can leverage this information to deceive and defraud your employees
- Social Media Phishing campaigns that teach teams how easy it is to collect and use the information they provide on these platforms for malicious purposes
- Email Phishing training to help employees learn how to spot and handle potential compromise attempts
- Media Drops that test your defenses and your team’s ability to resist the temptation to use
- Physical Security testing that ensures your colleagues keep safe against tailgating or “piggybacking” which involves an attacker accessing a restricted area by following someone with proper credentials
- Phone Phishing (vishing) training which enables people across your organization to recognize scams and fraud attempts so they’re not persuaded to act in favor of the attacker
- PhishEnterprise – an automated, self-managed or fully managed platform you can use for practical training exercises focused on social engineering tactics. Help your employees experience the consequences of these attacks with real-world simulations and teach them to develop a powerful filter to counteract them. The platform features:
- An engaging gamification system
- A full set of spear phishing attacks to use each month
- The ability to target a general audience and the flexibility to focus on particular departments in your organisation
- The option to discover how your teams fare to reduce their infection rate for various phishing attacks
- Contextualised feedback and guidance: when employees fall for a social engineering simulation, they receive a full guide that explains how the attack happened and which triggers could have saved them from being compromised.
We can also help you develop internal policies that keep your compliant (with GDPR, for example) and ensure your employees know who to contact and how to report social engineering attacks.
6 ways social engineering prevention helps your business thrive
When you work with our team of infosec specialists, you:
- Understand how your organization reacts to exploitation of human beings
- Learn how your employees perceive your security policies, how deeply they understand and follow them
- Show the people in your organization how small mistakes can grant cybercriminals access to higher privileges and deeper levels of confidential assets and data
- Discover and solve potential vulnerabilities before they turn into a security compromise
- Make security relevant and important for your teams to keep them engaged and help them make smarter security decisions
- Reward vigilant and responsible employees, using positive reinforcement to promote this behavior
An employee trained to recognize social engineering scams is more in control of his or her behaviour and can become a huge asset for your cyber security program.
We observe this positive impact throughout the offensive and defensive campaigns we run for our customers at Bit Sentinel.
We’d love the challenge to do the same for your team!
Train your employees to detect social engineering tactics
Our specialized training program focuses on both typical and atypical social engineering attacks.
Here’s a list of 10 practical things we can help your colleagues achieve:
- Lock their laptops while they leave their desk
- Use and share passwords securely
- Cultivate a habit of questioning requests for sensitive data, money or other types of assets
- Never let strangers into the building or into server rooms or areas where confidential information is stored
- Verify links in suspicious emails before they click on them
- Learn how to spot scams and fraud on email, social media, instant messaging platforms, on the phone or in physical mail
- Never share passwords for financial services, internal company platforms or devices used for work or personal activities (in the case of BYOD)
- Know who to call to double check money transfer requests to validate their authenticity
- Become aware of their blind spots and work to act cautiously around sensitive data or financial assets
- Learn how to communicate with each other in a way that sets the right expectations (“I’ll email you about this over the next 2 days”)
Ready to act and decrease the risk of human compromise?
