Social Engineering Incident Response: Tools To Help Prevent An Attack

Written by Patrick Martin | October 10, 2024

Social engineering attacks are the most pervasive cyber threats and hardest to defend against because they capitalize on human errors or weaknesses to trick people into unknowingly disclosing sensitive information.

Cybercriminals have devised increasingly sophisticated methods to infiltrate your network by targeting individuals as a work-around to hacking your technology.

Such attacks can leave your critical systems and information, and that of your customers and vendors, at risk—including usernames, passwords, email logins, bank account details, and credit card numbers.

After reading this article, you will understand the hidden dangers of social engineering and the key steps to take to keep your sensitive data and assets safe.

How Does Social Engineering Work?

Some estimates attribute 98 percent of all cyber attacks to social engineering; a typical organization gets hit with over 700 social engineering attacks annually.

Once these malicious actors gain a foothold into your systems, they can leverage that unfettered access to their advantage.

That could mean holding your sensitive data ransom by threatening to disclose it or restricting your access to it until a ransom is paid to them. These cyber con artists could also be looking to rope you or an employee into disclosing specific, highly sensitive company information.

Cybercriminals tend to cast a wide net, thereby increasing the chances of ensnaring unsuspecting users, from lower-level staff to company executives.

A social engineering threat can present itself in a variety of ways.

Phishing is the most commonly used social engineering attack. These scams take many forms, masquerading as reputable websites, emails, phone calls, or text messages.

They are designed to convince the user of their authenticity to lure them into revealing sensitive information out of curiosity, fear, or a sense of urgency.

Through various phishing techniques, hackers craftily manipulate their victims using virtual illusions—pretending to be someone or something they’re not.

Here are three common phishing scams:

Spear phishing is a popular phishing scam, accounting for about 90 percent of all such attacks. Bad actors are able to collect a user’s personal information to launch targeted campaigns against a specific company or individual.
Smishing (SMS phishing) and vishing (voice phishing) are newer types of phishing tactics that are becoming more prevalent. Smishing uses text messages embedded with links to fake websites.

If clicked on, victims may unknowingly share their account credentials. With vishing, victims receive a call or voice message pretending to be from a legitimate company or contact to trick victims into divulging sensitive personal and financial information.
Whaling or business email compromise (BEC) is another phishing variant. This method of attack can sometimes target an executive at an organization, prompting some action with a legal threat or other ruse.

Cyber thieves can also use a spoofed email to pose as a top executive, a client, or vendor to request payments, wire transfers, payroll or banking account changes, and other financial fraud.

How Can I Prevent, Detect, and Respond To Social Engineering Threats?

Since social engineering uses human psychology to bybass network security systems, there is no way to prevent it. It uses human vulnerabilities as its means of entry, rather than trying to exploit a technical security gap.

Given the many variations of social engineering schemes, these cyber threats can ensnare anyone.

The best way to ward off such threats is to provide employee cybersecurity awareness training. Regular training using modules and real-world simulations creates the best defense against social engineering threats.

By involving all staff in the security awareness training, you establish a buy-in culture where staff have a vested interest in recognizing and remaining vigilant against potential threats.

While security awareness training minimizes human risk, you also need to establish key cybersecurity protocols and tools to fortify your entire IT environment.

Here are some other tools to consider:

Encryption scrambles data to safeguard data from unauthorized access

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) Requires users to provide multiple layers of identity verification to access devices, applications, data, and other parts of your IT network

Antivirus and anti-malware software provides continuous monitoring, detection, containment, and alerts about malicious threats

Anti-spam filters scan your inbound and outbound emails and block spam and malware from being delivered to your contacts

Incident response plan to immediately quarantine any malicious attacks and begin remediation to minimize damage to your infrastructure

What Are The Top Compliance Issues I Should Know About?

Many companies are required to maintain compliance with cybersecurity regulations for their industries. Contractors doing business with the federal government have to follow their own set of requirements, outlined in NIST 800-171 and CMMC.

Companies that don’t meet those security standards could face severe consequences and even lose their contracts. Ensuring that your company stays compliant means you can avoid legal and other consequences while maintaining your business relationships.

In addition, detailed incident record-keeping of any breaches not only meets regulatory requirements, but it can also help you better position yourself against future threats.

Organizations can use the knowledge gained from any social engineering breaches as teachable lessons to strengthen their security measures or human responses to prevent future occurrences.

What’s The Bottom Line?

After reading this article, you understand what social engineering attacks are and their most common forms. You also realize the importance of having an established detection and response plan, along with providing employee awareness training, in the early detection and quick containment of social engineering threats.

By having a detection and response system in place, you will likely be resolving another issue at the same time: regulatory security compliance. A proper incident response will also satisfy one of the security requirements of CMMC and NIST.

Now that you understand the importance of having an effective incident response system, you may be wondering how to go about putting one in place at your business.

From here, the next best steps are to make sure you understand your compliance requirements and to start working to identify the sensitive information within your organization.

There are free resources online that can serve as a framework for your cybersecurity plan, or you can hire an external managed IT services provider to come in and assess your risk. Your MSP can then help you develop a security plan that addresses your specific needs. 

At Kelser, we help keep customers keep their infrastructure safe, available, and efficient by providing managed IT services that include cybersecurity solutions. Whether you work with Kelser or not, we hope you'll take the steps outlined in this article to develop a cybersecurity plan that works for your organization.  

We believe in honesty and transparency, which drives us to provide articles like these that feature the information you need to keep your infrastructure operating optimally.

We understand that managed services aren’t right for every organization. Having said that we are confident that our comprehensive solution provides the IT solution many businesses seek. Read this article to learn more: How Much Does Managed IT Cost? What’s Usually Included?

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