How can you prevent social engineering from attacking your systems? Social engineering is a very dangerous threat that can compromise your organization’s integrity and its employees’ private information.
Thus, every organization needs to take steps to fight this menace before it becomes a real threat. Some ways to prevent social engineering are:
Prevent Social Engineering with these Tips
1. Security Awareness Training:
Security awareness training is a great way of educating people about social engineering and cyber security in general. This training focuses on educating employees about their personal safety, how they can identify a phishing attack, the importance of password management, etc.
2.Virtual Security:
Virtual security involves creating fake software, websites, or emails to make people aware of the dangers that lie in the cyber world around them
3.Network Segregation:
Network segregation involves keeping the computers that store sensitive information away from computers that store less sensitive data to protect sensitive information from being leaked to other networks.
4.Penetration Testing:
Penetration testing or ethical hacking involves employing professionals to break into a network or system to find its weaknesses and fix them before the real attackers can attack
5.Disabling AutoComplete:
Disabling AutoComplete prevents the user from saving his/her username and password in browsers. This stops the hackers from stealing the saved credentials and using them to access the user’s account
Some of the most common social engineering attacks are discussed below:
- Phishing: Phishing refers to the act of sending an email to a user asking them to click on a link and provide their personal information. The website looks exactly like the real one and tricks the user into providing their private information.
- Spoofing: Spoofing is the act of sending an email from someone else’s account and using the email address of that person to trick the receiver into believing that the email is from that person
- Vishing: Vishing is an act of phishing carried out over the phone. The attacker calls the target, pretending to be their bank, credit card company, or any other service provider and asking the target to reveal their private details
- Ransomware: Ransomware is a type of virus that locks a person’s system and asks for money in exchange for unlocking it. Some examples are Cryptolocker, CryptoWall, and Locky ransomware.
How to Prevent Social Engineering
When an attacker manages to gain access to a target’s system, he/she then explores the system and tries to find out the username and password of the target user. Once they have access to the target’s account, they can easily impersonate them and take control of the system.
So to help protect yourself from getting phished, you should do the following:
1. Get educated about phishing attacks and understand how they work.
2. Be aware of what is going on around you.
3. Train your employees about how to identify phishing emails.
4. Set up protections against phishing emails.
In summary, Social Engineering is a very dangerous threat that can compromise your organization’s integrity and its employees’ private information. Thus, every organization needs to take steps to fight this menace before it becomes a real threat.
