Beware of These Social Engineering Techniques

The easiest to maintain uptime is to prevent the avoidable. Cyberthreats might vary in appearance and severity, but there are plenty of steps you can take to keep your network safe and sound.

How Strong Is Your Cybersecurity?

When the world of technology adopts an innovative new tool or service, it’s not only positive areas that are affected. When the hardware or software you’re using grows in sophistication, it’s safe to assume that plenty of cyberthreats are growing right along with it.

Preventing cybercrime is a never-ending, frustrating process, and it involves more than just updating your cybersecurity. Your team needs to stay up to date on how they can keep your network safe. But how can they outsmart such a diverse range of threats?

What Is Social Engineering?

The key is to remain educated and aware, which can be accomplished through routine tests and simulations. One of the most common threats that needs to be taken into consideration is social engineering. Social engineering is when a hacker (who can come from anywhere) uses false messaging tools to manipulate, influence, or deceive users in order to gain control over your network.

Common methods include phone calls, emails, or direct contact, which are all frequently used to gain access to your computer network. (More specific examples include phishing emails, spear phishing, and CEO fraud.)

If you don’t take the proper precautions for maintaining your network security measures and critical infrastructure, your valuable personal information could be at risk. Whether it’s your bank account information or your credit card, social security number, or any other sensitive data, there are risk management strategies you can use to repel social engineering attacks.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the techniques that are commonly used by social engineers, so your team is informed and will be in the best position possible for stopping an attack before it breaks down your entire network.

Stay Safe with SSE

Put in the time now to learn, identify, and repel these threats. The longer you wait to modernize your cybersecurity, the more likely you are to suffer from a security breach. Reach out to our team today, and be sure that your employees are as prepared as possible to defend your network from external threats.

Spear Phishing

Your inbox is one of the most likely places for a cyberattack to take place. We all know how easy it is to absentmindedly click a link that someone sent to us. Hackers take advantage of this innate action we all perform by researching a subject that the user is likely to be interested in and sending an email to their inbox about that subject. Phishing attacks have only become more sophisticated, and they often resemble any other email that a friend, coworker, or client would send you.

Phishing

This is similar to spear phishing, but this kind of email typically masquerades as a popular social media site, your bank, or some other entity that you interact with frequently. There’s not too much of a difference between this kind of attack and spear phishing; the end game is still to acquire sensitive information.

Pretexting

Using some tangible knowledge of the victim (whether it’s their birthday, social security number, or something else sensitive and theoretically private), a hacker will attempt to extract even more information from you.

Rogue

Rogue scanner (also known as anti-spyware, anti-malware, or scareware) is a form of computer malware that aims to deceive users into paying for the removal of fake malware.

Quid Pro Quo

Hackers will often pretend to be your company’s IT support and offer you a quick fix in exchange for some form of compensation (whether it’s monetary or confidential information that they don’t have access to).