Establishing and maintaining a strong cybersecurity presence at scale requires protection where a company is arguably its most vulnerable, with its people. Employees are essential, but companies face a vulnerable human attack surface without equipping employees with training and a threat monitoring system prepared to combat social engineering.

This guide serves to provide cybersecurity and IT professionals with the resources needed to prevent social engineering security breaches, train employees to spot and report an attack, and learn how to stop a threat before it becomes an issue.

‍

What is Social Engineering?

‍

Social engineering is an attack strategy that attempts to compel an employee to provide sensitive login, financial, or other details to a malevolent actor. Cybercriminals use psychological subterfuge to trick a company stakeholder into providing them access to a network or a secured physical space.

A successful social engineering attack often results in similar consequences to a direct cybersecurity attack: financial, operational, and reputational damages.

‍

How Do Social Engineering Attackers Successfully Manipulate People?

‍

Cybersecurity criminals know everyone feels curiosity, fear, and other emotions. Criminals leverage these emotions for their social engineering attacks.

‍

• Urgency: Attackers fabricate a sense of urgency to force employees to make rapid-fire decisions without considering the entire situation.
  
  • Example: An employee who posted online that they just got back from vacation receives an email claiming that their account will be locked in 24 hours unless they click a link to verify their information. The employee clicks the link, which installs malware on their laptop.

‍

• Fear: Feeling afraid of repercussions is a powerful catalyst for action that also overrides reasoning and critical thinking when making decisions.
  
  • Example: A new customer service employee receives an angry phone call, which is actually from a hacker group. The "client" demands to cancel their plan, or they will report the employee. Afraid of repercussions, the employee discloses financial details for a high-profile client.
    
    

• Curiosity: Humans are naturally curious, wanting to seek answers to questions. Social engineering tactics exploit this by luring employees into traps.
  
  • Example: Outside the office, an employee finds a USB drive with company branding labeled "C-Suite Quarterly Objectives." Tempted to learn more, the employee plugs in the flash drive, which installs ransomware on all devices in their facility.
    
    

• Trust: Social engineering scammers will often claim to be IT support or executive personnel and reach out to ask for login credentials or security reset questions to "solve a technical problem."
  
  • Example: An employee posts on LinkedIn that they were hired for a new job. A hacker researches the employee and calls them after hours, posing as their boss. Wanting to be a "team player," the employee divulges their login details.
    
    

• Greed: Offers appealing to our desire to gain wealth, access, and opportunity can cloud judgment and lead to short-sighted decision-making.
  
  • Example: An employee gets a text offering a $25 gift card for completing a work survey. The employee quickly completes the survey, not realizing the suspicious request for his work email and login ID.
    
    

• Helpfulness: People are naturally inclined to help one another. If someone is experiencing trouble, we want to step in for their benefit.
  
  • Example: An employee spots someone holding a large box outside a restricted floor. The employee opens the door for them, not knowing the situation was a ruse and that they have allowed a cybercriminal access to the facility.
    
    

Types of Social Engineering Attacks and Their Risks

‍

Social engineering attacks are complex and require a strong defense to mitigate. That requires a key understanding of how to identify a social engineering attempt.

‍

• Phishing: An attacker sends a suspicious email or message requesting privileged information or that an employee clicks a link. This link will often steal account details or install malware on the device.

‍

• Spear phishing: A targeted form of phishing that focuses on a specific individual or organization. Attackers painstakingly research their victims to learn contextually relevant information that allows their phishing attempt to seem more credible.

‍

• Vishing: Short for "voice phishing," a hacker sends convincing phone calls or voicemails to deceive an employee into divulging information. The attacker will often pose as an IT team member or executive personnel.

‍

• Smishing: Smishing is a phishing attack carried out through mobile text messages. Attackers send carefully crafted texts to urge victims to take action.

‍

• Pretexting: An attacker assumes a false identity and contacts a potential victim with a well-fabricated scenario detailing why the attacker urgently needs the victim's help. The more context-rich and believable the story, the more dangerous the attempt.

‍

• Tailgating: A physical security threat where an unauthorized person gains access to a restricted area by simply following someone with authorized access into the secured space.

‍

What is the Best Countermeasure Against Social Engineering?

‍

Knowing how to prevent social engineering attacks requires robust security features, continuous monitoring, and universal reporting capabilities. The best countermeasures against social engineering attacks combine multiple technical solutions with employee training.

A strong social engineering defense strategy includes Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), continuous threat monitoring, and secure communication channels. MFA adds an extra layer of security, preventing unauthorized access even if login credentials are compromised. Continuous threat monitoring helps detect and learn from social engineering attempts, enhancing future security measures. Secure communication channels allow employees to verify suspicious messages through alternative means, reducing the risk of phishing attacks. Regular security audits further strengthen defenses by identifying vulnerabilities such as weak access controls, outdated software, or unsecured third-party applications.

Implementing strict access controls, proactive policy-making, and awareness of social media risks further mitigates threats. Role-based access and network segmentation limit hackers' ability to move laterally within a company’s systems. Encouraging employees to use email spam filters, participate in penetration tests, and engage in security training enhances preparedness. Additionally, educating employees on how their social media presence can be exploited in pretext attacks strengthens overall security awareness.

Doppel’s Social Engineering Defense Framework (SED) integrates these strategies into a comprehensive approach to protecting organizations from evolving social engineering threats.

‍

The Social Engineering Defense (SED) Framework

‍

The SED Framework redefines cybersecurity by proactively connecting threats, adapting to evolving tactics, and disrupting attacker infrastructure before they can reach their targets.

‍

The three pillars of Social Engineering Defense:

‍

1. Multichannel Monitoring

Multichannel monitoring provides comprehensive threat detection by monitoring and correlating threats across all digital channels, including domains, social media, messaging platforms, email, and the dark web. This approach is crucial because attackers often coordinate campaigns across multiple platforms. By connecting the dots between these channels, multichannel monitoring identifies attack patterns early, allowing organizations to respond before threats escalate.

‍

2. Multimodal Analysis

This feature leverages AI and expert analysis to examine text, images, voice, videos, and metadata, continuously adapting to evolving social engineering tactics. This advanced approach is essential because attackers constantly refine their methods. By utilizing multimodal analysis, the system learns from each attempt, identifying manipulation techniques before they can inflict harm, ensuring proactive defense against digital deception.

‍

3. Multivector Defense

Multivector defense allows you to disrupt Attacks at the Source takes a proactive approach by mapping and dismantling attacker infrastructure, including malicious domains, email addresses, and fake profiles. Reactive defenses often fail to keep pace with evolving threats, making it crucial to neutralize attack campaigns before they escalate. By employing a multivector defense strategy, this approach effectively shuts down the core components of cyber threats, preventing further damage.

‍

Key Benefits of adopting a SED strategy:

For CEOs:

• Protect Brand Reputation: Safeguard customer trust by preventing brand impersonation and deepfake attacks.

‍

• Financial Stability: Minimize the cost of data breaches, fraud, and recovery through proactive threat disruption.

‍

• Competitive Advantage: Position your organization as a trusted brand by ensuring secure and authentic digital interactions.

‍

For CISOs:

• Strengthen Security Posture: Implement a proactive, adaptive defense strategy that grows stronger with every attack attempt.

‍

• Operational Efficiency: Reduce alert fatigue and incident response times by correlating related threats across channels.

‍

• Stakeholder Confidence: Demonstrate effective risk management and proactive defense strategies to boards and stakeholders.

‍

Introducing Doppel: The First Social Engineering Defense Platform

‍

Doppel's platform Vision provides a robust social engineering defense platform across the human attack surface. Vision scans domains, social media platforms, and apps to protect a company’s brand, executive, and internal communications from social engineering attacks.

‍

Vision monitors and shuts down profiles that impersonate executive personnel, identifies malicious duplicate company URLs, scans for deep fakes, and enhances social engineering protection across all company email accounts.

‍

Using generative AI, Vision learns from every blocked impersonation attempt, centralizing insights to help IT and cybersecurity teams effectively predict, prevent, and neutralize social engineering threats before they disrupt daily operations.

‍

Using generative AI models, Doppel's Vision crawls across the dark web, social media profiles, and applications to detect stolen company data. Once found, the security breach is reported, and Doppel's countermeasure platform targets the hacker to make their social engineering efforts costly and ineffective, ensuring long-term protection.

‍Connect with Doppel for a free demo and learn how to safeguard the human attack surface at scale.