Social engineering is the art of manipulating genuine users into revealing confidential information that can be used to gain unauthorized access to their computer systems. Are you investing in your staff training to prevent this?
Social engineering is a form of deception that is used to gain unauthorised access to buildings, systems, or data by a threat actor. This is possible by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques. The types of information social engineers are seeking can vary, but when individuals are targeted the criminals are usually trying to trick you into giving them your passwords or bank information, or access your computer to secretly install malicious software–that will give them access to your passwords and bank information as well as giving them control over your computer.
UK Businesses are still not taking seriously the threat that comes from social engineering. Considering how reliant we are becoming on technology it is essential to protect that technology from malicious attacks. The danger of social engineering is that it targets the individuals in business and preys on human error. Criminals use social engineering tactics because it is usually easier to exploit your natural inclination to trust than it is to discover ways to hack your software.
The ultimate objective of social engineering is to coerce someone to provide information that leads to ill-gotten gains; anything is possible. Effective social engineers can obtain the following information:
If any of the above information is leaked, financial losses, lowered employee morale, decreased customer loyalty, reputation damage and even legal and regulatory compliance issues are possible.
The assessment-execution phase is followed by the analysis & reporting. Defendza performs analysis on the testing output, evaluates the risk impact and likelihood of exploitation in realistic scenarios before providing action plans to remediate the identified risks. All our reports address business as well as the technical audience with supporting raw data, including mitigation measures at strategic and tactical levels.
Email addresses are harvested from the internet using special scripts to look for target domains.
Based on the naming notation, personnel names are searched from online sources that are then used to create email addresses. This is one of the techniques used as a preparatory step for phishing campaigns.
In this phase, we obtain details about the organisation and their staff using various online sources. This includes (and is not limited to)
From email address and social media websites like LinkedIn, details about the staff would be obtained. This would include -
Vishing involves phishing using the phone. The phisher calls an unsuspecting victim over the phone pretending to be a worker of a supplier, support helpdesk or even from the bank, to collect personal information.
Unlike email phishing, for Smishing, the attack vector is a phone number. The phisher pretends to act on behalf of a trusted or legitimate company and sends an SMS to the unsuspecting victim. This could be a genuine sounding reason that needs immediate attention like e.g..., announcing that they have won a prize or offering them to participate in a raffle or context.
Email phishing is one of the easiest types of phishing and is used to trick unsuspecting users into giving information without their knowledge. This phishing can be launched in several different ways:
Based on the response received from the reconnaissance phase, the target list is prioritised. The priority would be based on "low-hanging" fruit that could aid in gaining a foothold within the network trivially.
The first step of reconnaissance activity includes passively identifying the hosts and services visible on the Internet. This includes limited Open Source Intelligence phase. During red teaming or related offensive security projects, this exercise involves extensive information gathering about a customer's people, processes and technology in use. Research based threat intelligence is an integral part of any offensive exercise.
Overall, the aim of this phase aims to harvest as much information as possible about your organisation that would be used for later phases.
Our reports are comprehensive and include all the evidence that supports our findings. We give you a risk rating that considers how likely an attack is as well as the impact it could have. We don’t create panic scenarios. Our mitigation is detailed, covering both strategic and tactical areas to help our clients prepare a remediation plan.
Apart from the range of commercial and open source tools available for specific testing, our team has its own custom scripts for efficient testing. We provide accurate results to make sure our clients completely understand any vulnerabilities we report.
Our teams are led by veteran security consultants accredited by CREST standards for the last several years. Our experience shows that our clients are best served by giving them the right advice for their cyber security needs. We do not believe in spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt to generate more business.
