A malwareless and linkless phishing attack uses sextortion and the threat of legal action to get the attention of potential victims and get them to respond. Usually, the intent of a phishing attack is evident. For example, if the attack is pretending to be Microsoft and sends you to a spoofed login page, the whole point of the attack is to harvest the victim’s Microsoft 365 credentials.
Identity and authentication management provider Okta has warned of social engineering attacks that are targeting IT workers in an attempt to gain administrative privileges within organizations’ networks.
No, phishing and social engineering are not the same. Phishing is a subset of social engineering, meaning phishing attacks are a form of social engineering, but not all social engineering is considered phishing. Read on to learn more about what differentiates phishing from social engineering and how to protect yourself from both.
Continuing coverage of IBM’s recently-released Cost of a Data Breach report, we focus on the impact attacks involving social engineering have on data breach costs. There are two reports every year that we cover on this blog that you should be reading – Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report and IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report. Each of these reports has been published for years, providing insight into how the state of data breaches are changing.
Most social engineering scams search out their potential victims, often sending emails to known email addresses, sending chat messages to them or calling known phone numbers. The attackers take an active role in seeking out and making contact with their victims.
A few weeks ago, GitHub posted on their blog a recent security alert that should have any organization in the tech industry worried. GitHub identified a social engineering campaign that is targeting personal accounts of employees that work for technology firms. This campaign is using a combination of repository invites and malicious npm package dependencies to strike.
How can you take a proactive approach to your organization’s cybersecurity strategy? Scoping the threat landscape and having a solid incident response plan is a good start. But you also need to continuously seek out vulnerabilities and weaknesses to remediate or mitigate. These vulnerabilities and weaknesses aren’t just limited to systems and processes – the human factor plays a prominent part in many cybersecurity breaches.
Social engineering is involved in 70% to 90% of successful compromises. It is the number one way that hackers and malware successfully attack devices and networks. No other initial root cause comes close (unpatched software and firmware are a distant second, being involved in about 33% of attacks). A particular type of social engineering is responsible for more successful compromises than any other type of attack: spear phishing.
Social engineering has long been a popular tactic among cybercriminals. Relying exclusively on information security tools does not guarantee the safety of an IT infrastructure these days. It is critically important to enhance the knowledge of employees regarding information security threats. Specifically, there is often a pressing need to educate employees about phishing. But how could phishing awareness training go wrong, and what can be done about it?
As organizations across every sector come to rely more and more heavily on digital data storage, digital work platforms, and digital communications, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly common. Enterprising cyber attackers see opportunities abound with the widespread digital transformation across industries. Social engineering cyber attacks present a particularly potent threat to organizations.
