According to Digital Guardian, "Social engineering attacks typically involve some form of psychological manipulation, fooling otherwise unsuspecting users or employees into handing over confidential or sensitive data. Commonly, social engineering involves email or other communication that invokes urgency, fear, or similar emotions in the victim, leading the victim to promptly reveal sensitive information, click a malicious link, or open a malicious file."
A recent phishing campaign used LinkedIn branding to trick job hunters into thinking that people at well-known companies like American Express and CVS Carepoint had sent them a message or looked them up using the social network, wrote ThreatPost. If they clicked on the email links, recipients found themselves redirected to pages designed to steal their LinkedIn credentials.
Cyber Threats That Use Social Engineering
Analysis of hundreds of thousands of phishing, social media, email, and dark web threats show that social engineering tactics continue to prove effective for criminals. Download the report to learn more.
As social engineering attacks continue to grow in sophistication and frequency, companies should look to employee education as a first line of defense. Learn how to recognize and avoid social engineering attacks in this installment of our Data Protection 101 series.
Cyber criminals use social engineering tactics in order to convince people to open email attachments infected with malware, persuade unsuspecting individuals to divulge sensitive information, or even scare people into installing and running malware.
Your organization should take steps toward educating employees on the common types of social engineering attacks, including baiting, phishing, pretexting, quid pro quo, spear phishing, and tailgating. While there are technological solutions that help mitigate social engineering (such as email filters, firewalls, and network or data monitoring tools), having an employee base that is able to recognize and avoid common social engineering tactics is ultimately the best defense against these schemes. Here is a breakdown of common social engineering techniques:
Social engineering is a serious and ongoing threat for many organizations and individual consumers who fall victim to these cons. Education is the first step in preventing your organization from falling victim to savvy attackers employing increasingly sophisticated social engineering methods to gain access to sensitive data.
Social engineering is an attack vector that relies heavily on human interaction and often involves manipulating people into breaking normal security procedures and best practices to gain unauthorized access to systems, networks or physical locations or for financial gain.
Threat actors use social engineering techniques to conceal their true identities and motives, presenting themselves as trusted individuals or information sources. The objective is to influence, manipulate or trick users into releasing sensitive information or access within an organization. Many social engineering exploits rely on people's willingness to be helpful or fear of punishment. For example, the attacker might pretend to be a co-worker who has some kind of urgent problem that requires access to additional network resources.
Social engineering is a popular tactic among attackers because it is often easier to exploit people than it is to find a network or software vulnerability. Hackers will often use social engineering tactics as a first step in a larger campaign to infiltrate a system or network and steal sensitive data or disperse malware.
The first step in most social engineering attacks is for the attacker to perform research and reconnaissance on the target. If the target is an enterprise, for instance, the hacker may gather intelligence on the organizational structure, internal operations, common lingo used within the industry and possible business partners, among other information.
Perhaps the most famous example of a social engineering attack comes from the legendary Trojan War in which the Greeks were able to sneak into the city of Troy and win the war by hiding inside a giant wooden horse that was presented to the Trojan army as a symbol of peace.
In more modern times, Frank Abagnale is considered one of the foremost experts in social engineering techniques. In the 1960s, he used various tactics to impersonate at least eight people, including an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. Abagnale was also a check forger during this time. After his incarceration, he became a security consultant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and started his own financial fraud consultancy. His experiences as a young con man were made famous in his best-selling book Catch Me If You Can and the movie adaptation from Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg.
To obtain the source code for the device, Mitnick called Motorola and was connected to the department working on it. He then convinced a Motorola employee that he was a colleague and persuaded that worker to send him the source code. Mitnick was ultimately arrested and served five years for hacking. Today, he is a multimillionaire and the author of a number of books on hacking and security. A sought-after speaker, Mitnick also runs cybersecurity company Mitnick Security.
A more recent example of a successful social engineering attack was the 2011 data breach of security company RSA. An attacker sent two different phishing emails over two days to small groups of RSA employees. The emails had the subject line "2011 Recruitment Plan" and contained an Excel file attachment. The spreadsheet contained malicious code that, once the file was opened, installed a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability. While it was never made clear exactly what information was stolen, if any, RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication (2FA) system was compromised, and the company spent approximately $66 million recovering from the attack.
In 2015, cybercriminals gained access to the personal AOL email account of John Brennan, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the hackers explained to media outlets how he used social engineering techniques to pose as a Verizon technician and request information about Brennan's account with Verizon. Once the hackers obtained Brennan's Verizon account details, they contacted AOL and used the information to correctly answer security questions for Brennan's email account.
Cybercriminals used social engineering techniques in 20% of all data breaches in 2022 [*]. In 2021, the FBI received over 550,000 complaints of these crimes from Americans, with reported losses exceeding $6.9 billion [*].
In one of the highest-profile social engineering attacks of all time, hackers tricked Twitter employees into giving them access to internal tools [*]. The hackers then hijacked the accounts of people like Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Kanye West to try and get their many followers to send Bitcoin to the hackers.
The one predictable thing about social engineering attacks is that they all follow a similar pattern. This means that once you start to recognize the warning signs, you can quickly tell if someone is trying to scam you online.
The goal of every social engineering attack is to gain access to sensitive information such as bank accounts, company data, or Social Security numbers. The more access someone has to what criminals want, the more attractive that target becomes.
In the context of information security, social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or system access, it differs from a traditional "con" in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme.[1] It has also been defined as "any act that influences a person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interests."[2]
An example of social engineering is the use of the "forgot password" function on most websites which require login. An improperly-secured password-recovery system can be used to grant a malicious attacker full access to a user's account, while the original user will lose access to the account.
One example of social engineering is an individual who walks into a building and posts an official-looking announcement to the company bulletin that says the number for the help desk has changed. So, when employees call for help the individual asks them for their passwords and IDs thereby gaining the ability to access the company's private information.Another example of social engineering would be that the hacker contacts the target on a social networking site and starts a conversation with the target. Gradually the hacker gains the trust of the target and then uses that trust to get access to sensitive information like password or bank account details.[8]
Social engineering relies heavily on the six principles of influence established by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini's theory of influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity.
Linked to scarcity, attackers use urgency as a time-based psychological principle of social engineering. For example, saying offers are available for a "limited time only" encourages sales through a sense of urgency.
Vishing, otherwise known as "voice phishing", is the criminal practice of using social engineering over a telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward.[9] It is also employed by attackers for reconnaissance purposes to gather more detailed intelligence on a target organization.
Pretexting (adj. pretextual) is the act of creating and using an invented scenario (the pretext) to engage a targeted victim in a manner that increases the chance the victim will divulge information or perform actions that would be unlikely in ordinary circumstances.[12] An elaborate lie, it most often involves some prior research or setup and the use of this information for impersonation (e.g., date of birth, Social Security number, last bill amount) to establish legitimacy in the mind of the target.[13] As a background, pretexting can be interpreted as the first evolution of social engineering, and continued to develop as social engineering incorporated current-day technologies. Current and past examples of pretexting demonstrate this development. 2ff7e9595c
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