Social Engineering: The Manipulation of Human psychology.

Social engineering is nothing but playing with the human mind in which attacker tries to gain trust and take out the information from the victims. It's a technique where an attacker manipulates people and tricks them for security mistakes and takes out sensitive information. In one of our surveys in MIDCs in India, we found that 95% of businesses got victimized by social engineering attacks because of these manual errors.

The upper image is one of the examples of social engineering attack. Most of the organizations don't give their employees proper training in cybersecurity and assumes that installing antiviruses and high-cost systems can completely protect them from hackers but here's social engineering attack gives an advantage to attackers to compromise businesses in one or more step because "even you have deployed advanced systems in your enterprise but if your teams are not well trained for this these attacks it gonna happen". In this attack, the attacker gathers all the necessary information such as potential points of entry and weak security protocols, needed to proceed with an attack. Then those attacker moves to gain the trust of the victim and provide a stimulus for subsequent actions that breaks security practices such as revealing sensitive information or granting access to sensitive resources.

Social engineering includes different techniques such as baiting, scareware, pretexting, phishing, spear-phishing which are the most common form of digital social engineering assaults fortunately there are some common ways to identify these social engineering attack patterns some of the most common practices such as:

1. Using multi-factor authentication [2 step authentication]

2. Don't open suspicious emails and authentications.

3. Be wary of tempting offers.

4. Don't share your PI and sensitive data over call's at any cost.

5. Keep your enterprise software's updated.

These are some of the techniques to identify social engineering attacks also proper training is a must because if you are not able to identify the digital threats, then threats can damage your enterprise. Train your teams and initiate a cyber security program for your enterprise to create a safer workplace for your clients and employees.