Understanding Social Engineering: Tactics, Threats, and Prevention

Social engineering is the term used for a broad range of malicious activities that are accomplished through human interactions. It uses psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or giving away sensitive information. While the target, execution, and payout may differ, they all do one thing in common – they exploit certain universal human qualities like greed, curiosity, politeness, deference to authority, and so on.

To conduct an attack, a social engineer uses calculating tactics to deceive its victims into disclosing private information or performing a desired action. Many attacks begin on a personal level and rely on human error to advance the attack path. By invoking empathy, fear, and urgency in the victim, the enemy tries to gain access to personal information or the endpoint itself.

The technique is popular with cybercriminals because exploiting people’s trust and emotions is, sadly, often more effective than trying to hack a network. Another plus: It doesn’t require a lot of technical savvy skills.

Different types of social engineering attacks

There are different types of social engineering attacks, and each differs in the medium, nature, and ultimate target. Let’s have a look at each one of them below.

• On average, business organizations face more than 700 social engineering attacks annually.
• 98% of cyberattacks involve tricks or manipulation, covered under social engineering.
• According to Verizon’s 2023 Report, 10 percent of security incidents and 17 percent of data breaches were caused by social engineering.

Phishing

Phishing is one of the most common social engineering attacks. It involves sending fraudulent communications, usually emails, that appear to come from a legitimate source. The goal is to trick recipients into providing sensitive information, such as login credentials or financial details. Phishing can also happen through text messages, phone calls or via social media platforms.

Spear phishing

Spear phishing attacks are a type of social engineering attack wherein cybercriminals specifically target organizations to get access to confidential and sensitive information.

The difference between phishing and spear phishing is the target. Phishing, in general, casts a wide net and tries to target as many individuals as possible —think of it like shooting aimlessly. However, spearfishing targets a specific individual or a group of individuals in an organization to divulge sensitive data that the bad actor wants. In a spear phishing attack, the social engineer has done their research and accordingly set their sights on a particular user. 

Quid pro quo

“Quid pro quo” means “something for something” in Latin. 

In a quid pro quo attack, the attacker requests sensitive information from the victim in exchange for a desirable service.

For example, the attacker impersonates an IT technician, offering assistance. They get in touch with potential victims by providing help or service. In exchange for addressing the issue, they ask for sensitive information and login credentials or request the employee to temporarily disable security features.

Baiting

Baiting is a type of social engineering attack that uses temptation to lure victims and manipulate them into divulging secret or sensitive information. These messages often use false promises or curiosity hooks to grab readers’ attention. 

For example, a social engineer may hand out free USB drives to users at a conference. The user may believe they are just getting a free storage device, but the attacker could have loaded it with remote access malware, which infects the computer when plugged in. Moreover, baiting can also happen online. These scams can take the form of online promotions or tempting ads/offers, such as free game or movie downloads or phone upgrades.

Tailgating and Piggybacking

Tailgating is a simple social engineering attack used to gain physical access to a building or secure area in a building. The criminal may simply walk closely behind someone, and slip through an open door, right before the door is completely shut and locked.

Piggybacking is similar to tailgating; but in a piggybacking scenario, the authorized user is aware and allows the other individual to ‘piggyback’ off their credentials. An authorized user may feel compelled by kindness to open a secure door for a person claiming to be a new employee who has forgotten his access badge or for a lady holding heavy files or boxes.

Pretexting

Pretexting is a social engineering technique that uses a false identity to trick victims into giving up information. The attacker convincingly presents a legitimate-looking story or a scenario in front of the victim to able to launch a successful future attack. 

For example, the cybercriminal may know that the victim recently bought an item from Apple. Hence, the cybercriminal sends an email pretending to be an Apple customer service representative who needs to confirm the victim’s credit card information. In another physical attack scenario, by dressing up as someone from a third-party vendor, an attacker can pretend to have an appointment with someone in your organization’s building. To make the pretext more believable, they may wear a badge around their neck with the vendor’s logo.

Water-holing

Water-holing targets a group of users and the websites they commonly visit. The cybercriminal looks for a security vulnerability in one of these websites and then infects the website with malware.

Eventually, a member of the targeted group is infected by the malware. This type of social engineering is very specific and is hard to detect.

AI in social engineering

As AI technology continues to advance, its adoption in social engineering is likely to grow, further complicating the security landscape. With AI, threat actors are now capable of developing more personalized and deceitful attacks.

Some of the possible ways in which criminals can use AI to create advanced forms of social engineering attacks are:

• AI-powered tools enable cybercriminals to gather vast amounts of information from multiple sources, such as social media, public databases, and leaked data. With this wealth of information attackers can draft extremely sophisticated emails (with proper grammar and spelling correction) that appear as though a human wrote them.
• Scammers can create deepfakes (synthetic videos and fake virtual identities) that appear all too realistic, to engage victims in a conversation to reveal sensitive information like passwords.
• Attackers can clone human speech and audio to carry out advanced types of voice phishing (‘vishing’) attacks. etc

Criminals have been quick to capitalize on new-age technology to revolutionize their illicit game. Understanding these risks is crucial to stay one step ahead in the ongoing battle against cyber threats.

Things CTOs can do to prevent social engineering

• Educate the team on social engineering tactics

Awareness is the first line of defense against social engineering. CTOs should ensure all employees are familiar with the various types of social engineering attacks and how they operate. To create a human firewall, training should cover various types of social engineering tactics like Phishing, Pretexting, Baiting, Quid pro quo , Tailgating , etc. The sessions should also showcase examples of AI-generated attacks. A comprehensive security awareness platform with quizzes, interactive modules, and mock phishing scenarios can all help the users/employees learn how to become better defenders, too. 

• Use advanced technological safeguards

CTOs should utilize advanced AI-based detection tools to identify and mitigate attacks, especially AI-powered social engineering attacks. These tools can analyze patterns, detect anomalies, and highlight suspicious activities that may indicate a threat generated by advanced tools like AI.

•  Check and update your security patches

Cybercriminals generally look for weaknesses in the application, software, or systems to gain unauthorized access to your data. As a preventive measure, CTOs should always keep security patches, web browsers, and systems up to date with the latest versions.  If a program or device is deprecated, it needs to be replaced/repaired immediately. 

• Use multifactor authentication

For attackers, user credentials are a prime target, and multifactor authentication presents a massive barrier for any potential infiltrator. Hence, CTOs should incorporate multifactor authentication in all the systems across the organization.

Multifactor authentication is an excellent way to curb the flow of malware and other dangerous schemes. Two-factor authentication, on the other hand, adds a powerful layer of security. Even if a social engineering attack gets some user credentials, it won’t gain entry to the rest of the network when there are multiple hoops to jump through.

• Encourage reporting of suspicious activities

Encourage employees to report any kind of suspicious activities. Reporting suspicious emails, phone calls, and text messages helps the security team identify where attacks are coming from and implement better safeguards. Even simply forwarding a suspicious message to the IT or security team can be an effective first step to defense.

• Establish strict access controls and monitoring

Not every employee in the organization needs access to every single piece of data on the servers. From a security standpoint, keeping things compartmentalized also limits how much damage an attacker could do.

• Data backup

Data protection is an important aspect of the company’s business continuity strategy. Data backups are essential for quick recovery from a cybersecurity incident. Having a clean copy of the organization’s mission-critical data will help minimize downtime and disruptions to the business.

In brief

Protecting against social engineering is an ongoing challenge. It demands a combination of awareness, skepticism, and technological support. It is imperative to examine the top social engineering attacks and consider what preventive measures can be taken to safeguard the key assets and privacy.