CYBERSECURITY: Online Social Engineering is on the rise
Online social engineering is when scammers emotionally manipulate you into handling over your personal information. They take advantage of human behavior and trick you into thinking they are the real deal.
4 Tips to prevent a social engineering attack:
- Never reveal passwords or PINs via email or phone no matter how legitimate the request seems. Companies don't ask for these this way.
- Call them back. If you receive a call from a company requesting sensitive information, ask for their full name then call back on the number on their website.
- Resist the urge to click on suspicious links from anyone, even if you think you know them - always double-check the web address first.
- Think twice. If something sounds too good to be true, then probably it is. Even if it looks and sounds like it's coming from a reputable source.
Social Engineering: What does it look like?
Phishing, smishing, vishing: Scammers will reach you using emails, SMS, and phone calls: for example , they might do this pretending to be your bank. If it's legitimate, a company will let you contact them using official company channels.
Capturing curiosity: Curiosity is a big part of our human nature. But it is also a weakness that scammers exploit.
Pretexting: This is when hacker gathers information on you in order to gain your trust. One way is impersonating someone from your workplace and requesting changes to payments. This one commonly targets finance teams and is often successful.
Trade-off: Quite often, scammers will offer you something like technical assistance, access to a protected document, or a solution to a problem. They may not ask for money, instead, their goal is your login credentials, which they can use or sell.
Social engineering is just one of the many threats most companies are experiencing nowadays. Cyberattacks are escalating and before you knew it, it has hit your company. No company wants to be the next target
Paul Jackson, CEO/Cybersecurity Specialist along with his team at Jackson Technologies offers vriety of cybersecurity program which suits any kind of industry no matter the business size it.
Start your cyber strategy now before it's too late. Contact us today!