Unique types of Social Engineering

As the security measures are getting stronger, cybercriminals are leveraging new ways to exploit the weakest human links and try to find vulnerabilities in users. They often influence users to gain access to sensitive data. Social engineering is one such branch of hacking technique. According to KnowBe4’s report, more than 90% of successful cyber attacks and breaches start with one or many social engineering techniques like phishing.

What is social engineering?

Social engineering is the art of manipulating people in its most persuasive form to gain access to sensitive data or grab personal information from them. The types of information and details cybercriminals tend to seek usually vary as per the cybercriminals’ requirements. They not just use persuasive ways of communication but also use technical tricks. They will lure you towards something, and you will fall into their prey by giving them your login credentials and other financial details. Through such social engineering approach, they will either steal your sensitive information or will make you secretly install malware and other illicit programs through which they can gain complete access to the victim’s system.

Social Engineering Attack

Unique types of social engineering attacks

Social engineers leverage various techniques & tricks to implant ransomware or steal sensitive data from the target victims. Here is a list of some latest and unique methodologies of social engineering.

Types of Social Engineering

Here are some of the latest (2022) ones.

1. Diversion theft through phishing page: The diversion technique of stealing sensitive data is an old-school technique attacker still prefers today. Among various diversion techniques, phishing is the most common one. Here the attacker often uses spoofed email IDs (that often look legitimate) wherein they will provide a link to the victim. That link will redirect to a fake page or login form that will look like the original one. As the victim provides the login credentials to authenticate and access their account, the victim’s credentials get transferred to the attacker. According to 2022’s report by APWG’s Phishing Activity Trends Report, they revealed that in the first quarter of this year, there were 1,025,968 phishing attacks in total.

2. Deepfakes as social engineering attacks: The deepfake technology, along with ML and deep learning, is escalating various cybersecurity threats. Cybercriminals are leveraging deepfake technology to create manipulated or synthetic digital content for use to lure the victims or influence them into delivering sensitive data or doing specific actions. For example, cybercriminals will use the face of a reputed individual or a financial institution’s owner’s face to create video content and viral it. Seeing the owner saying about it, people will immediately get panic and perform a task mentioned in the video content or call for help from the given number. Neither the task nor the number is legitimate. It brings a lot of people to the target of such attacks.

3. Baiting with fake facts and banners: Social engineers also use spam emails, social media platforms, forums, and customer inboxes to attach or share fake e-banners and links as bait to lure customers into buying a particular item. They use eye-catching and persuasive phrases like Mega discount, 50% off, free, etc., that trigger the victim’s mind to click those digital banners and links. Once the victim clicks the link, it will download the malware or installs illicit programs into the system that can steal sensitive data or give the attackers access to your system.

4. SMS Phishing: As organizations started embracing SMS texting to communicate among employees & with outsourced partners, freelancers, and potential customers, SMS phishing is also gaining momentum. In this social engineering technique, scammers will send illicit text messages with links that might contain MFA bypassing or spoofing techniques. Such SMS phishing can also redirect the attacker to a malicious website that can implicitly steal sensitive information and credentials from the phone and might also allow downloading malware.

Preventive measures against unique social engineering attacks

To prevent such attacks, enterprises should educate their employees on some tips and cyber-etiquettes. Enterprises can also seek expert guidance and training from Packetlabs.

i. Individuals and employees should remain mindful of attractive offers over messages, emails, phone calls, etc., showing a sense of urgency.

ii. Employees should not open any attachments from sources or other employees they are not expecting. Before opening the attachment, you can call that person and verify if the email is legitimate or not.

iii. All security specialists recommend using complex passwords with multi-factor authentication to prevent your account from social engineering attacks.

iv. Enterprises should also leverage AI and ML-based dynamic authentication validation techniques like adaptive authentication for advanced security of employees’ accounts.

v. In the case of deepfake content, organizations, employees, or individuals should immediately send an email to the official email address of the firm asking if the content is valid or not. The sender can also attach the link to the content that might sound suspicious.

Conclusion –

We hope this article has given a crisp idea of what social engineering is & how sophisticated social engineering attacks are becoming. This article also highlighted some commonly used and latest social engineering attacks & how to prevent them. To stay ahead of such social engineering attacks, tap Packetlabs security services and enhance your corporate security stance.

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