In the 1990s, social engineering involved calling users to trick them into divulging their credentials or providing the dial-in landline number that connected a threat actor to an internal corporate server. Now, attackers use social engineering to trick targeted users into sending potentially millions of dollars to offshore bank accounts, costing organizations millions in damages. In some cases, employees lose their jobs after the fallout and damages.
In a cybersecurity context, social engineering is the set of tactics used to manipulate, influence, or deceive a victim into divulging sensitive information or performing ill-advised actions to release personal and financial information or hand over control over a computer system.
Cyber Threats That Use Social Engineering
Download Zip 🔥 https://tiurll.com/2yg5RL 🔥
A malicious science, social engineering uses psychological manipulation, persuasion, and exploitation to deceive users into making security mistakes or relinquishing sensitive information. Social engineering attacks rely on human interaction and often involve conning victims into breaking normal security procedures. For instance, social engineering attacks can be highly effective because they're based on the human tendency to trust others or explore one's curiosity about new offers or information acting as bait.
The lines between social engineering and phishing are blurred because they usually go hand-in-hand in a sophisticated attack. Social engineering usually involves masquerading as a legitimate employee (e.g., the CFO or CEO) or tricking an employee into thinking that the attacker is a legitimate customer in an effort to get the employee to provide the attacker with sensitive information or change account features (e.g., SIM swapping).
The overall technique used in social engineering is using emotions to trick users, but attackers use several standard methods to push the user into performing an action (e.g., sending money to a bank account) and making the attack look more legitimate. Usually, the techniques involve email or text messages, because they can be used without voice conversations.
Social engineering is one of the most common and effective ways an attacker can gain access to sensitive information. Statistics show that social engineering combined with phishing is highly effective and costs organizations millions in damages.
Proofpoint knows that social engineering attacks are highly effective at targeting human emotions and mistakes. We have security awareness training and education programs that help employees identify social engineering and the phishing emails that work alongside these attacks.
Just like most effective cyber-attacks, social engineering involves a specific strategy. Each step requires thoroughness because the attacker aims to trick the user into performing a particular action. Social engineering involves four steps. These steps are:
Consumer fraud is common in social engineering attacks. The attacker pretends to be a legitimate organization giving away prize money in exchange for financial data or a small payment. After the targeted victim provides financial data, the attacker steals money directly from the bank account or sells the credit card number on the dark web markets. Identity theft and stealing money from targeted victims are serious crimes.
Some social engineering is classified as a misdemeanor and only carries fines and short-term jail sentences. If crimes involve larger monetary amounts or target several victims, they can carry higher sentences and larger fines. Some crimes lead to civil suits where victims win judgments against criminals and those involved in helping with social engineering scams.
Social engineering is a crime, so malicious threats do not consider ethics when targeting individuals and corporations. Everyone is a target for an attacker, so both individuals and employees should be aware of how social engineering is carried out. An attacker must know their target and perform reconnaissance before carrying out a social engineering campaign, so users should also understand the ways social engineering works.
Some social engineering is ethical. When you hire white-hat hackers to penetration test cybersecurity, they will test all employees for their ability to detect social engineering attacks. In a penetration test, a certified ethical hacker calls employees to determine if they will divulge their network credentials or send phishing emails with a link that points to a malicious website. They log every user who clicks the link and take note of users who enter their private network credentials. This activity helps organizations determine the employees vulnerable to social engineering and provide them with more education on cybersecurity protocols.
At its core, social engineering is not a cyber attack. Instead, social engineering is all about the psychology of persuasion: It targets the mind like your old school grifter or con man. The aim is to gain the trust of targets, so they lower their guard, and then encourage them into taking unsafe actions such as divulging personal information or clicking on web links or opening attachments that may be malicious.
In a typical social engineering attack, a cybercriminal will communicate with the intended victim by saying they are from a trusted organization. In some cases, they will even impersonate a person the victim knows.
One of the greatest dangers of social engineering is that the attacks don't have to work against everyone: A single successfully fooled victim can provide enough information to trigger an attack that can affect an entire organization.
Over time, social engineering attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated. Not only do fake websites or emails look realistic enough to fool victims into revealing data that can be used for identity theft, social engineering has also become one of the most common ways for attackers to breach an organization's initial defenses in order to cause further disruption and harm.
Organizations should also establish a clear set of security policies to help employees make the best decisions when it comes to social engineering attempts. Examples of useful procedures to include are:
Phishing scams are the most common type of social engineering attack. They typically take the form of an email that looks as if it is from a legitimate source. Sometimes attackers will attempt to coerce the victim into giving away credit card information or other personal data. At other times, phishing emails are sent to obtain employee login information or other details for use in an advanced attack against their company. Cybercrime attacks such as advanced persistent threats (APTs) and ransomware often start with phishing attempts.
Watering hole attacks are a very targeted type of social engineering. An attacker will set a trap by compromising a website that is likely to be visited by a particular group of people, rather than targeting that group directly. An example is industry websites that are frequently visited by employees of a certain sector, such as energy or a public service. The perpetrators behind a watering hole attack will compromise the website and aim to catch out an individual from that target group. They are likely to carry out further attacks once that individual's data or device has been compromised.
When talking about cybersecurity, we also need to talk about the physical aspects of protecting data and assets. Certain people in your organization--such as help desk staff, receptionists, and frequent travelers--are more at risk from physical social engineering attacks, which happen in person.
Your organization should have effective physical security controls such as visitor logs, escort requirements, and background checks. Employees in positions at higher risk for social-engineering attacks may benefit from specialized training from physical social engineering attacks.
USB baiting sounds a bit unrealistic, but it happens more often than you might think. Essentially what happens is that cybercriminals install malware onto USB sticks and leave them in strategic places, hoping that someone will pick the USB up and plug it into a corporate environment, thereby unwittingly unleashing malicious code into their organization.
An email that seems to be from a trusted coworker requesting sensitive information, a threatening voicemail claiming to be from the IRS and an offer of riches from a foreign potentate are just a few examples of social engineering. Because social engineering uses psychological manipulation and exploits human error or weakness rather than technical or digital system vulnerabilities, it is sometimes called "human hacking."
Social engineering is attractive to cybercriminals because it enables them to access digital networks, devices and accounts without having to do the difficult technical work of getting around firewalls, antivirus software and other cybersecurity controls. This is one reason why social engineering is the leading cause of network compromise today according to ISACA's State of Cybersecurity 2022 report (link resides outside ibm.com). According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2022 report, breaches caused by social engineering tactics (such as phishing and business email compromise) were among the most costly.
Posing as a government agency or authority figure: People trust, respect or fear authority (in varying degrees). Social engineering attacks play on these instincts with messages that appear or claim to be from government agencies (example: the FBI or IRS), political figures or even celebrities.
The Nigerian Prince scam is probably the best-known example of this social engineering technique. More current examples include free but malware-infected games, music or software downloads. But some forms of baiting are barely artful. For example, some threat actors leave malware-infected USB drives where people will find them, grab them and use them because "hey, free USB drive."
Social engineering attacks are notoriously difficult to prevent because they rely on human psychology rather than technological pathways. The attack surface is also significant: In a larger organization, it takes just one employee's mistake to compromise the integrity of the entire enterprise network. Some of the steps that experts recommend to mitigate the risk and success of social engineering scams include: 589ccfa754
Fast And Furious 8 (English) movie download 720p in hindi
quality center download for windows 7 64 13