How to Protect Your Business from 5 Common Social Engineering Attacks

At the root of the majority of ransomware attacks is the tactic of social engineering, leveraged by hackers, which involves manipulating a person or persons in order to access corporate systems and private information. Social engineering plays into human nature’s inclination to trust. For cyber criminals, it is the easiest method for obtaining access to a private corporate system. After all, why would they spend the time trying to guess someone’s password when they can simply ask for it themselves?

Here Are the 5 Most Common Social Engineering Attack Types, and Strategies to Protect Your Business from Them:

5 Social Engineering Scams Your Employees Should Know

1. Phishing

   • The leading tactic leveraged by today’s ransomware hackers, typically delivered in the form of an email, chat, web ad, or website designed to impersonate a real system and organization. Often crafted to deliver a sense of urgency and importance, the message within these emails often appears to be from the government or a major corporation and can include logos and branding.

2. Baiting

   • Similar to phishing, baiting involves offering something enticing to an end-user in exchange for private data. The “bait” comes in many forms, both digital, such as a music or movie download, and physical, such as a branded flash drive labeled “Executive Salary Summary Q3 2016” that is left out on a desk for an end-user to find. Once the bait is taken, malicious software is delivered directly into the victim’s computer.
     
   
   

3. Quid Pro Quo

   • Similar to baiting, quid pro quo involves a request for the exchange of private data but for a service. For example, an employee might receive a phone call from the hacker posed as a technology expert offering free IT assistance in exchange for login credentials.
     
     

4. Pretexting

   • When a hacker creates a false sense of trust between themselves and the end-user by impersonating a co-worker or a figure of authority within the company in order to gain access to private data. For example, a hacker may send an email or a chat message posing as the head of IT Support who needs private data in order to comply with a corporate audit (that isn’t real).
     
     

5. Tailgating

   • When an unauthorized person physically follows an employee into a restricted corporate area or system. The most common example of this is when a hacker calls out to an employee to hold a door open for them as they’ve forgotten their RFID card. Another example of tailgating is when a hacker asks an employee to “borrow” a private laptop for a few minutes, during which the criminal is able to quickly steal data or install malicious software.
     
     
     

Layering Your Security Solutions

Begin with antivirus software. Antivirus, as its name implies, is designed to detect, block, and remove viruses and malware. Modern antivirus software can protect against ransomware, keyloggers, backdoors, rootkits, trojan horses, worms, adware, and spyware. Some products are designed to detect other threats, such as malicious URLs, phishing attacks, social engineering techniques, identity theft, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. A network firewall is also essential. Firewalls are designed to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic based on a set of configurable rules—separating your secure internal network from the Internet, which is not considered secure. Firewalls are typically deployed as an appliance on your network and in many cases offer additional functionality, such as virtual private network (VPN) for remote workers.

Patch management should be the next layer in your security protocol. Cybercriminals design their attacks around vulnerabilities in popular software products such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Flash Player. As vulnerabilities are exploited, software vendors issue updates to address them. As such, using outdated versions of software products can expose your business to security risks. There are a variety of solutions available that can automate patch management. Like patch management, password management is also an effective way of protecting your employees from social engineering attacks. Management tools allow users to keep track of all their passwords, and if any of your accounts are compromised you can change all of your passwords quickly. For more information about implementing these security solutions, reach out to iCorps for a free consultation.