When it comes to cyber attacks you’ll hear lots of terms thrown around, phishing, ransomware and now, social engineering attacks. Like the term implies, social engineering attacks occur when a hacker deceives the person based on their motivations and emotions. Particularly, a person with high credentials or access to a business network to gain access to critical data.
How do you know if a social engineering attack is happening? Remember MICE which stands for:
- Money
- Ideology
- Compromise
- Ego
These are the primary factors used when waging a social engineering attack. For example, an employee receives a harmless looking email offering a discount or a free gift card in exchange for clicking a link and sharing some basic information.
An employee, motivated by money, may be enticed to click the link in the malicious email, and before you know it, the hacker has access to your system and important documents.
Speaking with your team about paying close attention to the content and context of email messages, as well as encouraging them to alert your IT department for their guidance before clicking any unknown links is something all organisations should implement.
Training your staff to read the social engineering attack signs as well as general cyber security training is a crucial step.
So is reaching out to us at Vertex Cyber Security for assistance. We can help by performing a cyber security audit to identify vulnerabilities within your system, provide information to your IT department and staff and work as a strategic partnership to ensure if disaster strikes, there will be as little downtime and damage as possible.