Social engineering is effective for criminals and dangerous for businesses. It takes advantage of human behavior to gain access to systems. Consequently, no antivirus can work to prevent an attack if a criminal manipulates the target into making security mistakes.
So, how can you prevent such cyber-attacks? Here are five proven tips that can help you prevent social engineering attacks:
1. Train Your Employees
Cybersecurity relies heavily on human behavior. Therefore, your employees should be the first line of defense in detecting, and preventing social engineering attacks.
You must ensure that your employees understand the tricks cyber criminals use to perform a social engineering attack. Additionally, they should know the signs to look for to detect such an attack.
Some of the things your employees should never do include:
- Disclosing sensitive information over phone, text or email
- Opening attachments from unknown sites
- Allowing people into protected areas if they do not have the credentials and authorization to be in the protected area (some criminals use tailgating to enter protected areas)
- Warning your employees against responding to instructions that seem to be from executives or seniors at your organization without confirming via a call to that person.
Train your employees to remain skeptical when they receive requests that often seem urgent or have negative consequences when ignored.
Moreover, you can take your training a notch higher by conducting phishing simulations to help you detect how well your employees can identify a phishing attack.
2. Use Antivirus and Endpoint Security Tools
While social engineering attacks target your employees directly, you can prevent these schemes from reaching your employees by installing antivirus and endpoint security measures on all your company’s devices.
Fortunately, modern endpoint security tools and antivirus software are often capable of blocking links to malicious websites, obvious phishing messages, and IP addresses that are listed as threats.
3. Conduct Penetration Testing
Cybercriminals often find ways to penetrate your organization’s defenses. Unfortunately, they constantly look for angles to exploit the weaknesses in your security system. You can prevent this by working with an ethical hacker who uses his or her skills to identify these weaknesses by attempting to exploit them.
Together with an ethical hacker, you can learn the weaknesses your security system has and the social engineering techniques to which your company is most susceptible.
4. Update Your Software
Businesses that use updated software have lower chances of experiencing a social engineering attack. Specifically, updated software comes with security fixes to existing vulnerabilities.
Therefore, it is important to ensure that your firewall and antivirus software are from reputable organizations and are regularly updated.
However, cybercriminals continue to take advantage of businesses that have not yet updated their software.
5. Implement a Good Policy for Social Media Privacy and Posting
Social media sites provide the personal information that criminals require to plan and execute social engineering attacks.
So, if your employees post too much information about themselves and your business, it could lead to massive loss of sensitive data from your business. Therefore, establish a good policy on social media privacy and posting. This policy should include:
- Keeping personal and company social media accounts separate
- The information that can and cannot be shared on personal or business social media accounts
- Providing minimum information on job listings to prevent divulging information that criminals could misuse
Final Word
Protecting data should be a priority for every cyber-aware business. Unfortunately, even if you are a small business, you stand the risk of losing sensitive data about your accounts, accounts of your clients and customers, and other valuable information.
In conclusion, your business should be aware of social engineering attacks, how they happen, and ways in which you can prevent these attacks.
