When someone starts talking about social engineering, people often get confused. They think we’re talking about cloning. While having two of something you love may not be terrible, the social engineering we routinely cite is much, much worse. Social engineering is the act of using social interactions to get people to make cybersecurity mistakes. Today, we’ll take a look at social engineering and how it can have a negative effect on your business.
Social engineering is a very important component of many modern cyberattacks, as the popularity of phishing scams goes to show. Protecting yourself from phishing scams will require you to be able to identify them. For today’s tip, we’ll go over a few warning signs that someone may be trying to phish you through your email.
We’ve all caught the obvious spam email, like the message that is clearly bogus, or the offer that is definitely too good to be true. We’re going to confidently assume none of our readers are getting tricked by Nigerian Princes or getting roped into order virility drugs from an unsolicited email. The real threat comes from the more clever phishing attacks. Let’s take a look.
Chances are, you’ve heard of “phishing” – a cybercriminal’s scam that steals data, access credentials, and other sensitive information by fooling a user into thinking they are providing this information to someone who is supposed to have access to it. However, there are a few different kinds of phishing, based on how it is carried out. Here, we’ll discuss the realities of spear phishing, and the risks it poses to your business.
There’s a big reason why phishing is a primary threat to businesses, and it’s because this method gives hackers a relatively risk-free way of gaining access to a network or other resources. Even being aware of the issue is often not enough to prevent it, as hackers are known to get quite aggressive and crafty with their phishing campaigns. If only a fraction of the 57 billion phishing emails that go out every year are taken seriously, hackers make quite a bit of profit off of users.