Social Engineering
Overview
Social engineering is a term used to define malicious activities carried out by psychologically manipulating users into disclosing sensitive information. Used in almost every email attack, social engineering aims to trick the consumer into giving up passwords, bank information, or access to their own computer.
Attackers use techniques such as mining marketing databases and stalking social media profiles and corporate websites to choose their targets. When they have collected enough data, they impersonate their target’s trusted brand or friend. They then meticulously draft emails with maximized urgency and tension. Due to personal insecurities, victims get trapped and respond to the attacker quickly. The attackers then proceed to steal the victim’s data and money.
Stats
A large number of IT professionals affirm that they are frequently tricked by hackers’ social engineering tactics. IC3 reports that socially engineered business email compromise is the costliest cybercrime today. These stats present a grim picture, but such attacks can be avoided. With the use of stringent email standards such as DMARC, these attacks can be warded off.
- 98% of cyber attacks rely on social engineering.
- 43% of the IT professionals said they had been targeted by social engineering schemes in 2020.
- New employees are the most susceptible to socially engineered attacks, with 60% of IT professionals citing recent hires as being at high risk.
- 21% of current or former employees use social engineering to gain a financial advantage for revenge, out of curiosity, or simply for fun.
- Social engineering attempts spiked over 500% from the first to the second quarter of 2018.
Steps to Prevent Social Engineering
- Avoid opening emails from unverified and suspicious sources.
- Enable multi-factor authentication for improved security.
- If an offer is too good to be true, it’s nothing but a scam. Be extremely cautious of offers received via email.
- Keep your anti-malware system updated.
- Adopt DMARC, SPF, and DKIM for your domain if you haven’t. DMARC acts as the first line of defense against social engineering attacks.
How Can DMARC Help?
DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) is an email authentication standard or protocol that determines whether an email is authentic or not. It relies on SPF and DKIM, two other protocols, to decide the authentication status of an email.
DMARC provides insights into the sending IP address of an email and reveals its original source. This makes it hard for attackers to send emails laced with social engineering to steal data and money from an organization or an individual. The receiver can look at the DMARC report and verify the domain used for sending the email. If the IP address of the domain doesn’t match with the registered set of addresses, the incoming email will either be rejected or quarantined. This is a highly effective method to combat the menace of socially engineered spoof emails.
For detailed information, read more on What is DMARC?
The EmailAuth Edge
EmailAuth provides free tools to validate and verify domains for DMARC, SPF, and DKIM. To monitor and verify your DMARC records, use EmailAuth’s DMARC Record Checker. To check your SPF records, head to SPF Record Checker. Further, you can use EmailAuth’s DKIM Record Checker to verify your DKIM records.
You can also set up DMARC on your domain using EmailAuth’s DMARC Record Generator. It completely automates the setup process for DMARC, making it easier to choose who is allowed to send emails on your domain’s behalf and keep track of that domain’s enforcement policies.
Apart from providing companies and organizations with email security and complete control of their email domains via DMARC, EmaiAuth has other added advantages. Head to Benefits of DMARC to read more about them.