Anatomy of an Attack
Social engineering is used in virtually every advanced email attack. The techniques used come in various forms, usually involving personalized messages with details harvested from social networking sites or other public sources.
PHASE 1: Profile
Research Targets
Organized cybercrime rings are highly sophisticated, mining marketing databases, social media profiles, online archives and corporate websites to identity and profile targets.
PHASE 2: Personalize
Tailor Attack
Through well-researched, expertly-crafted email messages backed by matching phishing sites, these thieves impersonate a trusted individual or brand.
PHASE 3: Push
Deliver Emails
Some campaigns will score their first victims in under four minutes. Others will involve meticulous grooming over weeks or even months, as gain the trust of unsuspecting business or consumer targets.
PHASE 4: Persuade
Manipulate Emotions
Through carefully-timed messages designed to maximize tension and exploit personal insecurities, victims rush to respond without carefully assessing the legitimacy of the sender or the message.
PHASE 5: Plunder
Reap Rewards
Criminals receive and launder funds before vanishing into thin air. Or they infiltrate compromised accounts and extract valuable data and information that can be monetized in future crimes.
Why Do Social Engineering Attacks Work?
Field CTO, John Wilson, discusses how social engineering attack tactics such as urgency and authority work to trick people into doing something they normally might not.
The Fortra Advantage
Protection From Social Engineering Attacks
While traditional attacks leverage technology-based system vulnerabilities, social engineering attacks take advantage of human vulnerabilities by using deception to trick victims into performing harmful actions.
Agari carefully inspects each incoming email, analyzing the human relationships and behaviors. By understanding the identities behind the message, Agari spots the anomalies prevent attacks regardless of social engineering triggers.
Security Against Identity Deception
Identity deception is core to social engineering and the key to tricking people into downloading malware, logging into fake web pages, or giving up information.
Agari social engineering security detects threats and prevents identity deception tactics such as display name deception, spoofing, lookalike domains, and messages sent from hijacked sender accounts.
Get From SEG to CEG: The Rise of the Next-Generation Cloud Email Architecture guide
Automated Partner and Supplier Fraud Prevention
Cybercriminals often pose as a trusted supplier or partner in order to launch successful spear phishing, ransomware, business email compromise attacks, or other social engineering-based attack.
Agari automatically models your business partners, their relationships, and behaviors to auto-generate protection policies. This hands-free approach guarantees that your employees are protected against the modern social engineering-based attacks of today and those we expect in the future.
