What is Social Engineering?
Social engineering is a cybersecurity attack. These attacks by cybercriminals use deception via social engagement to convince your team to provide them confidential information.
What is Social Engineering Testing from RedTeam Security?
Our security experts act as cyber-criminals to approach each engagement to gain company information. To catch a cyber-criminal, you must think like a criminal. We start by threat modeling which identifies what information the criminal would need and what part of the network they would target to get it. Our security professionals then create a pretext (a scenario) to use in the execution of the "attack". RedTeam social engineering testing assesses your people, processes, and procedures via email phishing, telephone vishing, and onsite attempts to breach physical safeguards.
Types of Social Engineering Services
RedTeam Security offers the following types of Social Engineering Services to test the non-technical components of your cybersecurity program.
Email Phishing
Email Phishing is a common delivery method for ransomware attacks. Cyber-criminals use email phishing to gain a foothold on internal networks to enable phishing attacks, data breaches, and other internal network attacks.
Exchanges of sensitive information over email happen almost constantly. Rarely do email exchanges go through the proper channels for authentication and authorization. RedTeam Security's social engineering testing uses email phishing and spear-phishing in hopes of baiting staff into visiting unknown websites, divulging sensitive information, or getting them to perform an action they otherwise should not be.
Telephone Vishing
Much like email, exchanges of sensitive information over the phone happen at an almost constant rate.
In many cases, we trust that the person on the other end of the phone is who they say they are. This is especially true if they have information about the company, we are more apt to believe them.
Cyber-criminals are moving away from email and more toward telephone social engineering - RedTeam Security uses telephone social engineering (Vishing) to coerce staff into divulging sensitive information and get them to perform an action they typically would and should not.
Physical Social Engineering
During a physical, social engineering engagement, RedTeam Security engages staff directly (overt) or indirectly (covert) to identify weaknesses in how they physically handle visitors and those pretending to be employees, vendors, or business partners.
RedTeam Security's social engineering tactics include our social engineers masquerading as vendors, new employees, business partners, and more to entice staff into divulging sensitive information or permitting access to sensitive areas of the facility.
Our Methodology
Learn more about RedTeam Security's Social Engineering Methodology.
Benefits of Social Engineering
Social engineering pen testing assesses employees' adaption and adherence to the security policies and practices you put into place. Our social engineering penetration testing service will provide you and your company with the deep truth about how easy it would be for an intruder to convince your employees to break security rules. When security rules are broken, it allows cyber-criminals access to sensitive information. The benefit is that you will know first-hand how successful your security training and procedures are working for your company.
As the CISO for your company, you have performed a security assessment and developed policies and procedures. Multiple training sessions have been conducted and communications sent regarding security controls, who to notify in case of a suspected scam, phishing email, or potential social engineering attack, procedures for identifying callers before sharing confidential information, and visitor procedures. But will team members follow those procedures in a real-world situation?
RedTeam Security's Social Engineering Services can help you decide by testing the different aspects of your security program.
Schedule Your Free Virtual Meeting with a Social Engineering Expert
While technology has given criminals ample opportunity to exploit organizations, social engineering is a classic technique these "bad guys" use to exploit an organization's weaknesses to gain access to valuable information. RedTeam Security's rigid social engineering testing will help your organization educate everyone on your team or access your information to learn how to protect and safeguard it from criminals. Our social engineering testing will highlight potential problems so you can use our findings to prevent a breach from occurring.
To learn more, schedule your free virtual meeting with a RedTeam Security expert today at (952) 836-2770.
Social Engineering FAQs
- What is social engineering and examples? Social engineering is the manipulation of human beings to obtain confidential or otherwise private information that a person would not otherwise divulge. An example of social engineering would be an email urging users to click a link to confirm their recent purchase. When users click on the link, it takes them to a spoofed web page that mimics a popular shopping website, and when entering their login credentials, hackers capture the data.
- Which industries are the most likely targets of a social engineering attack? Financial services, healthcare, and supply chain companies are some of the most highly targeted industries due to access to personal and financial records.
- Why do cyber attackers commonly use social engineering attacks? Users remain the weak link in the chain of defense within most mature organizations, making social engineering attacks highly successful and lucrative for cybercriminals.
- Why is social engineering testing important in ethical hacking? Social engineering testing lets organizations know how well their current protections are working and what areas of employee awareness training need improvement.
- What is pretexting in cybersecurity? Social engineering pretexting is when an attacker or cyber-criminal tries to convince you to expose sensitive or valuable information or gain access to a service or system. Pretexting is when the attacker makes up a story to fool you, the victim.
Social Engineering: Detect & Mitigate
Download Free Resource Download Free Resource