What is Social Engineering and How to Prevent Attacks

What is Social Engineering?🐱‍💻

Social engineering, in the context of information security, includes various techniques designed to deceive individuals into giving away confidential information. As it stands today, human error is the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Indeed, threat actors feed on this understated vulnerability and psychologically manipulate them into facilitating security breaches.

An organization’s digital estate may appear to be impenetrable and sacrosanct, however, it takes one vulnerability to crumble years of security work, leading to costly implications: companies suffer from reputational damage and have to spend years to build back trust with their customers.

Exploiting the principles of human psychology, threat actors carry out concerted steps to orchestrate security breaches. Simply put, the following steps are carried out to breach data:

• At first, they investigate a vulnerable employee/s, sometimes scaling these efforts by hiring a team of miscreants to accelerate this process. The objective is to uncover the target’s motivators and weaknesses that may lead them to act irrationally.

• Next, the attacker proceeds to organize a series of stimuli that may nudge at least one victim into granting access to crucial information. The goal is to build trust based on the information gathered, and acquire access to systems that are not easy to break in.

• Once critical systems are compromised and security holes are established, the attackers ghost the victim and disappear into thin air.

Humans frequently resort to reasoning shortcuts and mental biases that lead them into making decisions that they might later regret. As such, malicious actors make efforts to gain access to confidential data by exploiting this side of the human mind.

Techniques used for Social Engineering

Various techniques are leveraged by threat actors to carry out social engineering attacks, and each one of these techniques has one thing in common - it exploits a human’s predisposition to make irrational decisions, rather than vulnerabilities in systems. Social engineering can be broadly categorized under five types:

1. Phishing Attack
2. Quid Pro Quo
3. Scareware
4. Watering Hole
5. DNS Spoofing and Poisoning

⚠️Phishing attack

A phishing attack occurs when an attacker tries to gain access to crucial systems by sending links via emails, SMS, and other instant messaging applications. These attacks take shape through fear-mongering tactics and create a sense of urgency in the mind of the victim, prodding them to make hasty decisions. Needless to say, some phishing emails look very legitimate and contain links to malicious websites.

An example of a phishing attack is an email from the Microsoft Account team indicating that a new email has been added to the account from an unknown source. The email prompts the unsuspecting user to visit a website and reset their password by entering their current information.

⚠️Quid Pro Quo Attacks

A quid pro quo attack exploits the basic human tendency to reciprocate actions others have done towards us. As such, a quid pro quo attack involves the exchange of information, a reaction resulting from feeling obligated to return favors.

An example of a quid pro quo attack is when an employee receives a call from someone impersonating the company’s IT. The reason for the call can be to indicate that the receiver’s laptop has surfaced in their quarterly security audit as being infected with malware and requires intervention from this caller. On the pretext of removing malware from their laptop, the caller gains access to their work computer and hijacks critical systems.

⚠️Scareware

Scareware is commonly characterized by victims being constantly inundated with pop-ups while they’re surfing the internet. The pop-ups indicate that the victim’s computer is compromised and requires cleaning. The pop-up either prompts the victim to download malicious software or navigate to a website that infects their computer.

⚠️Watering Hole

A watering hole is a tactic where threat actors compromise legitimate company websites by gaining unauthorized access and infecting the computers of those that visit the website. For instance, threat actors may compromise a popular healthcare site and gain access to confidential healthcare information from the unsuspecting site visitor's computer.

For this approach to concretize, hackers research their target to understand what websites they visit. They then find a website that has security flaws and can be easily compromised with malicious links and malware.

⚠️DNS spoofing and poisoning

Domain Name System (DNS) spoofing exploits vulnerabilities in DNS servers, rerouting traffic from actual, intended servers to fraudulent servers. It’s a sophisticated form of social engineering attack where hackers impersonate a client website to intercept confidential information.

Social Engineering: 5 Ways Businesses Can Prevent Attacks

The widespread prevalence of social engineering attacks leads us to our next question: How can organizations prevent, or better manage these attacks after a security compromise is detected? The following section offers an outline for cybersecurity professionals seeking techniques to keep their organizational resources and networks secure.

In this section, we discuss:

1. Security awareness and training
2. Security simulations
3. Deploying getaways to filter scam emails
4. Setup privileged access
5. Adopt continuous monitoring and alerting best practices

Security Awareness and Training

A company’s cybersecurity posture significantly depends on how its employees react to realistic-looking malicious email solicitations. Hence, as platitude as it may sound, security awareness and sensitization play a vital role in thwarting cybersecurity risks.

Effective security training equips employees to distinguish between legitimate emails and malicious emails. And, in the event that they’re on the fence regarding its authenticity, they’re educated to check in with their security teams.

Security Simulations

Organizations can gauge their employee’s awareness levels by sending realistic-looking phishing emails. These are used in tandem with security training after employees are trained in recognizing potential threats.

Deploying Getaways to Filter Scam Emails

Security analysts can nip the problem in the bud by solidifying their email getaways to filter out spam emails. Email getaways are constructed in a way where they’re able to prevent spam emails and forward real emails to the recipients, protecting businesses from spam, viruses and malware. They’re designed to scan attachments and URLs for signs of malicious content.

However, one downside of email getaways is that they cannot protect from sophisticated, multi-stage attacks, which are now becoming more frequent. To put this into perspective, email getaways may fail to detect malicious codes inserted within an excel sheet attached to a legitimate-looking email.

Set up MFA and Privileged Access

In order to minimize security risks, 2FA (Two-factor authentication) or MFA (Multi-factor authentication) are commonly used. A multi-factor adds an added layer of security in that it requires users to present two or more proof points to gain access to a crucial system. A common example is using a password in combination with a one-time password sent to your phone for self-authentication. Should one of their verification channels become compromised, a hacker will still be not able to access a system.

Adopt Continuous Monitoring and Alerting Best Practices

A company’s cybersecurity posture must be augmented with monitoring tools that can be used 24/7/365 to thwart cyberattacks and intrusions, identify policy violations and enforce company policies in real time. Monitoring and observability tools offer a scalable, cost-effective medium to secure the IT infrastructure and meet cybersecurity regulations. Notifications from monitoring tools can be reliably delivered to on-call cybersecurity analysts by integrating with alerting platforms. Alerting platforms ensure that critical incidents surface above the cluttered channels of email/SMS and deliver persistently until they’re acknowledged.

For small to medium-sized businesses and startups that are equally, if not more at risk from a security breach, they may seek out services from Managed IT Security Service Providers (MSSP). Per Gartner, MSSPs can be defined as the “provider for outsourced monitoring and management of security devices and systems”, and they help organizations navigate through complex requirements such as VPN, email getaway implementation, firewall management, vulnerability scanning, SOC services etc.

Conclusion

As organizations face rising threats from social engineering, it is only imperative to start building a formidable defense strategy. While psychological manipulation can test the robustness of any solution, organizations can minimize their risks by turning their employees into frontline cybersecurity watchdogs by offering top-notch training and simulations frequently.