You might have stumbled on the internet quite a few times about the phishing and social engineering attacks, how they manipulate the professionals of the IT department that lack the dedicated experience. A social engineering attack is carried out using human interaction or social skills to obtain or compromise information about a company. It could be customer information or information relating to the finances of the company. The person or attacker can orchestrate themselves in a variety of ways such as saying that they are a repairman, a new intern, an employee or merely the worker of the same company from different departments or sections.
Next thing you know, they start asking you a series of random questions such as how long have you been working here? How does the network is configured for your specific section or other similar questions? They will start to corner you out to win your confidence in them and would extend their friendship until they have squeezed you enough to spill out the information they require to commence a cyber attack. This is how social engineering works, how networks are brought down along with the dedicated companies, and how a successful cyber attack without the use of specialized technical elements is commenced.
What is Phishing?
Phishing, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated form of the social engineering attack in which the attackers won’t have to confront the victims face to face but instead to use the electronic means to do this. An email or link would be sent to the victim by the attackers imitating as the representations of some financial or other security-related company and asking for sensitive information from the client. Often there is a form of urgency that supports the link that if related information not provided, the customer could lose their account or their online support would be suspended.
The best way to deal with the phishing attack is to avoid any interaction with the phished email or link whatsoever. Don’t pay even the smallest of the attention to these false claims; this is the only way through which you can tackle this type of attack in a better way. On the contrary, if someone provides the related information to the attackers, they can use this information to hack or access the sensitive accounts of the consumers.
How to Avoid these Scenarios?
After reading through the above part of the article, you must be suspecting how you could avoid these scenarios altogether? What can you do to make sure that you don't get hooked by such attackers? This is where the concept of the pentesting comes into play. For some of the people that don’t know about the pentesting here is a detailed overview;
What is Pentesting?
Pentesting or penetration testing is a discipline of information technology that brings into account the use of various skills, principles, technologies as well as the knowledge acquired by the professionals from over the years to check or speculate the technical systems in detail. Speculation here means that all the technical systems such as security systems, networking, marketing, and or other sections of the IT-based company are remotely checked and concerned by the pentesting professionals in great detail.
The detailing here corresponds to finding any potential source of hazards, entry points by the cybercriminals, or nodes of a breach within the networking systems. If found, the professionals can then guide the company to eradicate the anomalies or devise them a modified general security plan which then can be implemented to overcome the issues as found within the analysis run by cyber officials.
A pentesting expert is duly responsible for running detailed analysis of various systems and networking parameters, for finding out various inconsistencies within working systems and how to overcome them. If you feel like that you have fell victim to either phishing or social engineering attacks and want to emerge strongly in the future, then this is the time to do so. We have provided a detailed guide about the remedies or tips that can be adopted to overcome such attacks in the future;
- The first thing that you need to do when a query about verifying your account regarding financial or other company-oriented metrics arise you first need to check the source and then proceed with the validation process.
- Do not under any circumstances provide deliberate information about the company or personal information about yourself within these emails threads or supported links that surface within the emails.
- You need to pay special attention to the working of the websites that request sensitive information from you. Such as what is the URL of the website and how does it operate. Sometimes the URL of the site that you are referring to with sensitive information or financial circumstances could be a little changed than the official website. Such as with a difference of .com with .net. This is a warning sign for you that you need to drift away from the website, as this is not the official or genuine version of the website.
- For the emails that might be phished and if you happen to be in doubt about their authenticity, then it is recommended that you verify the source of the email first. This is rather simple and can be done with the help of the contact us section provided over the official homepage of various sites. From there, you can take both the phone number of the representative of the related department or their email and confirm the details of a confirmation email sent to you. They will then confirm whether they sent that kind of email to you or didn't. This way, you will know that the provided email was genuine or a hoax.
Social engineering attacks are very difficult to unearth; pentesting training is required by the professionals to pursue a career as a pentesting expert. There are some best information security courses available to you on the internet; this is your likeness whether you select this career or not.