Social engineering refers to psychologically manipulating people to make them act or divulge information—this is an activity that happens all the time without us even realizing that it is happening. All forms of persuasion or leveraging influence to make someone behave in a certain way or make decisions that benefit us are social engineering. However, in our context, we shall concentrate on deliberate efforts by individuals to defraud, especially from a financial standpoint.
Since human beings are the weakest link in cybersecurity, 98% of all cyberattacks result from the social engineering of individuals within an organization, including senior management and IT professionals. Furthermore, fraudsters conduct most of these attacks successfully, impersonating senior management and targeting new employees.
Social engineering attacks fall under two broad categories. The first is ‘credential’ or ‘personal information harvesting’ for sale on the dark web—the information is used for proper attacks involving account creation or takeover at a later time. The other one, a more sophisticated form of social engineering attack, involves forcing victims in real time to conduct fraudulent activities or grant access to fraudsters through a remote connection to gain access to online banking platforms.
Scammers use all three forms of phishing to obtain enough data and impersonate account owners to access and transfer funds.
Organizations can minimize their exposure to social engineering attacks, especially phishing, by training their employees on the basics of cybersecurity. Most phishing attempts can be stopped by just a simple change in behavior, such as ensuring that the attachments received with emails were anticipated and are actually from a legitimate source.
A strong email filtering and email malware scanning tool can also help reduce some of these attacks. There should be internal policies and procedures defining communication protocol within the organization. This means that there should be a way of verifying the legitimacy of over-the-phone instructions to transfer funds from senior management. If the beneficiary is new or unknown, there should be a procedure in place for proper verification.
Behavioral biometrics methods, such as the one offered by BioCatch, can also be used to combat the use of information for phishing activities. Behavioral biometrics can differentiate legitimate users from fraudsters by comparing their behavior once they log into a secure system like an online banking channel. It is capable of flagging the login session as legitimate or illegitimate based on how the user performs certain tasks, such as pages the user visits or the pace at which they navigate the various service menus. With this, behavioral biometrics detects whether the user is under the control of someone else or is the legitimate user of the account.
However, all these efforts cannot wholly eliminate social engineering attacks for as long as systems used in banks require human intervention. The endgame: minimize human engagement, especially with core banking systems and information warehouses, and opt for automation.
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