Acronis has warned of an increase in attacks based on social engineering techniques. According to some estimates, these account for as much as 98% of successful cyberattacks, and without adequate protection, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in particular face a high risk of compromise, data loss and operational outages.
Social engineering exploits human emotions – often in an insidious way – to achieve dubious goals, whether gaining physical access to offices or online access to corporate systems. According to a PurpleSec survey, 43% of IT professionals encountered an attack based on social engineering methods in the past year. 21% of current or former employees use social engineering to gain financial benefits, for revenge, or simply out of curiosity or for fun. 43% of such attacks target SMBs.
According to Acronis, the following social engineering techniques are the most common:
- Instilling fear. A potential victim may receive an email announcing enforcement action unless they pay a fictitious tax debt to the tax authority using the attached link.
- Appealing to greed. This may involve an email or Facebook Messenger message announcing a lottery win or a new iPhone in exchange for providing personal information and bank account details.
- Creating curiosity. Examples include fake emails from shipping companies such as DHL or FedEx notifying recipients of an incorrect address and providing a link to correct it, leading to infected websites.
- Requesting help. Sent from a stolen account of an acquaintance on a social network, asking for a quick transfer of funds to the attached account.
- Exploiting empathy or compassion. Social engineering does not thrive only online; a person can also become its victim in the real world, for example by complying with an unknown person's request to let them into a building on the excuse that they forgot their access card.
“Social engineering techniques are as old as humanity itself, but it was only with the internet economy that they gained astonishing reach and potential,” said Štěpán Bínek, responsible for sales of Acronis cloud solutions at ZEBRA SYSTEMS. “They are often at the beginning of an attack that ends with the encryption of corporate data. Given people's natural tendency to trust, attacks based on social engineering can never be completely eliminated, but their impact can at least be minimized with technical means.”
Acronis recommends a combination of cybersecurity tools, such as anti-malware, firewall, email filtering, multi-factor authentication and timely software updates. Integrated solutions such as Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud are ideal against social engineering techniques, enabling organizations to protect their systems, applications and data with a comprehensive set of security tools.
Source: https://www.acronis.cz/tiskove-zpravy/acronis-5-nejcastejsich-technik-socialniho-inzenyrstvi/
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
