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How to Protect Your Business From Social Engineering Attacks

By October 19, 2020November 7th, 2022No Comments6 min read
Social Engineering Attacks

Most hackers use social engineering to launch their attacks. They can use social engineering to send ransomware to your employees. Hackers can also use this attack to manipulate their employees. They might get access to your data by manipulating a person. It is the easiest method for hackers as it is easy to trick humans. Hackers recently used it to hack into famous Twitter accounts. They can ask for your employee’s passwords themselves. This will remove the hassle of guessing their password. Thus, it is very important to protect your business from these attacks. In this article, we will share some tips that will help you protect your business from social engineering attacks.

Training

Hackers will use social engineering attacks to manipulate their employees. You should ensure that your employees know about all the tricks attackers use. This will protect them from these attacks.

For example, you should teach your employees about phishing attacks. Most attackers will send phishing emails to your employees. They will try to send malicious attachments to your employees. You should ensure that your employees can recognize these emails.

Attackers can also use social engineering attacks to initiate BEC or Business email compromise. Your employees should know about these attacks. This will help you in protecting your employees from attackers.

Phishing simulations

Most malware infections occur from phishing emails. The best way to teach your employees about these phishing emails is by running phishing simulations. This software can be cloud-based. If you are running cloud-based simulations, then you can manage them from a remote location.

Metrics and feedback are critical in this process. It will help you understand the areas where you can improve your phishing detection.

Prevent scam emails

Hackers will generally use emails to trick your employees. Thus, you should filter out all spam emails. You can use email gateways to remove these spam emails. There is more than 15 billion spam sent every day. These emails are dangerous and malicious. Attackers use these emails to steal your data. You can use cloud-based email gateways to protect your employees. These gateways can reduce spam by more than 99.99%.

Avoid pre-texting

In this attack, the hacker will try to create a sense of trust between the end-user and themselves. They will impersonate themselves as a worker. Sometimes they will act as the company CEO to gain access to private data. For example, attackers will act as the IT head and try to get access to your private data. Your IT team will think that they are running corporate data.

You can avoid this issue by giving proper training to your employees. Your policy should mention all pre-texting challenges and how to deal with them. Your employees should verify the sender’s identity before giving them sensitive data.

Social Media Policy

One of the most famous social engineering attacks is grooming. In this, they will try to collect data from the victim. Attackers can use spear-phishing emails from this data. They can use the intelligence collected from your employees to create a real-looking email. Attackers will generally use social media accounts to collect this data.

Your employees should know that they can’t share everything on social media. If they share everything on social media, attackers can easily pose as your employees. However, this is a tough policy to implement as you can’t control your employees’ actions.

Protect mobile devices

Most people will open texts without worrying about any attack. Thus, MShing is becoming popular with time. Attackers are using mobile text for sending phishing emails. Attackers can use various mobile Trojans available on the dark web. Also, most people will open their texts.

You should ensure that your employees know about the attack vector. If they use their mobile devices in the workplace, they should never download unauthorized mobile apps. One infected device is enough to infect your whole network. Thus, it is essential to protect your employees’ devices from attackers. Make sure that they are using antivirus apps to protect their devices.

Privileged Access

These attacks rely on the escalating privileges principle. This will help attackers in gaining access to your network resources. You should add another security layer to protect your data. Authentication will ensure that attackers can’t use your employee’s device to access your resources.

Multi-factor authentication is very important for modern businesses. In this, your employees need to first enter their username and password. However, they also need to enter a one-time password(OTP) which will be sent to your employee’s mobile devices.

This will ensure that attackers can’t use phishing to steal your employee’s credentials. It is challenging to steal OTPs. Also, you should give roles to your employees. This will ensure that your employees will have access to limited resources. They can’t access your sensitive data and resources.

Regular monitoring

Your IT security team should regularly monitor your networks. This will ensure that they can stop a security process. If you need to follow strict regulations, then regular monitoring is very important. It would help if you looked for effective ways to monitor your network. If your IT team is busy monitoring your network, then they won’t get time to work on your core products. This will reduce their productivity. Thus, you should consider working with a good MSP. Your partner can help you in monitoring your network.

Conclusion

These are some tips that will help you in protecting your business from a social engineering attack. If you don’t have access to an in-house IT security team, then it will be challenging to implement these tips. Thus, you should consider working with an MSSP. They will help you in protecting your business from various attacks. Also, you will get access to a large IT security team. Experienced MSSPs like Bleuwire will regularly monitor your network for attacks. They will use advanced technologies for spotting anomalies. Monitoring will ensure that all your tools are up-to-date. If you need more information regarding IT Security services, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.