• Shivam Maurya
• June 06, 2024
• No Comments

Social engineering is one of the tricks that hackers use to deceive individuals into disclosing data or letting them into a system unfathomably. These attacks influence the human psyche and rely on trust, and therefore are a threat to personal and corporate interests.

Understanding Social Engineering Tactics

Social engineering is a form of cyber attack and it can assume the following forms; 

a) Phishing. 

b) Impersonation frauds.

• Phishing emails are unsolicited messages that are crafted in a manner that seeks to ensnare the recipient into disclosures of his/her login details or other private information.

• Pretexting is whereby one devises a false situation or scenario in order to persuade the target into trusting the attacker.

Mitigating Social Engineering Risks

But detecting such attacks is possible only if users are aware of these attacks and are more careful with their interactions on social networks.

• Communicate with employees at least once a month, providing information on how to identify and counter socios careless behavior.

• Be cautious or skeptical in particular when dealing with offers or inquiries that are seemingly too good to be true requiring forms to be filled out or personal details to be revealed.

Essential InfoSec Best Practices

Information security can go a long way to minimize the disguise of social engineering attacks on an organization by being professionally proactive.

• Certain guidelines that should be put in place are as follows: 

First of all, it is essential to put stringent measures in place for handling sensitive data and secondly there should be strict measures for verifying identity.

• Constitutes: Periodically revisits and synchronizes access control mechanisms to limit the users who have privileges in important systems and resources to the right details.

Knowing how social engineering works and by taking adequate security precautions, it is therefore easy for one to avoid such deceptive efforts by the attackers. Through awareness, training and understanding the various mechanisms that we have as security information needed to wade off social engineering attacks.