This week, I’m circling back to the subject of email security to talk about socially engineered attacks. We’ll go over how they work, what problems they cause, and how we can work together to strengthen your defenses. I might scare you a bit, but I promise it’s for your own good.
In socially engineered attacks, the hacker studies the intended victim and designs a personalized phishing scheme intended to fly under the radar (after all, the best crimes are those that are never discovered). The attacker identifies the victim’s vulnerabilities and tracks their behavioral patterns. Do you transfer x amount of dollars to a specific vendor every month? This information may be used by the assailant to pose as that vendor, use similar language, and request a transfer within a similar context. We have even seen attacks where a known vendor’s order form was copied and used to appear legitimate. With socially engineered attacks, all it takes is a moment of weakness or distraction to fall pray to these intricate and insidious assault. Here is an in depth read on social engineering attacks and various techniques attackers use. I highly recommend reading up and increasing your awareness.
As artificial intelligence and security services get better at detection, attackers rely on more targeted socially engineered attacks. It does not matter who you are or what you do. If you use an email address and have contacts who trust you, you make a great target. So how can we strengthen our defenses? We have already been beefing up our email security stack as a response, and in the coming days we’ll be launching a comprehensive email security review for all of our clients. Certain security features such as multiple factor authentication are tremendously helpful in keeping bad players out, and it will be an important part of our review. My team and I will always look out for you, and we ask you bring the same level of commitment for your cybersecurity so we can keep you safe.
We’re here for you, and together, we’ve got this!
– Burak Sarac, Team Lead
|