Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Continuing coverage of IBM’s recently-released Cost of a Data Breach report, we focus on the impact attacks involving social engineering have on data breach costs. There are two reports every year that we cover on this blog that you should be reading – Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report and IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report. Each of these reports has been published for years, providing insight into how the state of data breaches are changing.

Most social engineering scams search out their potential victims, often sending emails to known email addresses, sending chat messages to them or calling known phone numbers. The attackers take an active role in seeking out and making contact with their victims.

A few weeks ago, GitHub posted on their blog a recent security alert that should have any organization in the tech industry worried. GitHub identified a social engineering campaign that is targeting personal accounts of employees that work for technology firms. This campaign is using a combination of repository invites and malicious npm package dependencies to strike.

How can you take a proactive approach to your organization’s cybersecurity strategy? Scoping the threat landscape and having a solid incident response plan is a good start. But you also need to continuously seek out vulnerabilities and weaknesses to remediate or mitigate. These vulnerabilities and weaknesses aren’t just limited to systems and processes – the human factor plays a prominent part in many cybersecurity breaches.

Social engineering is involved in 70% to 90% of successful compromises. It is the number one way that hackers and malware successfully attack devices and networks. No other initial root cause comes close (unpatched software and firmware are a distant second, being involved in about 33% of attacks). A particular type of social engineering is responsible for more successful compromises than any other type of attack: spear phishing.

Social engineering has long been a popular tactic among cybercriminals. Relying exclusively on information security tools does not guarantee the safety of an IT infrastructure these days. It is critically important to enhance the knowledge of employees regarding information security threats. Specifically, there is often a pressing need to educate employees about phishing. But how could phishing awareness training go wrong, and what can be done about it?

As organizations across every sector come to rely more and more heavily on digital data storage, digital work platforms, and digital communications, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly common. Enterprising cyber attackers see opportunities abound with the widespread digital transformation across industries. Social engineering cyber attacks present a particularly potent threat to organizations.

Researchers at Check Point outline various forms of tailgating attacks. These attacks can allow threat actors to bypass physical security measures via social engineering. “Tailgating is a common form of social engineering attack,” the researchers write. “Social engineering attacks use trickery, deception, or coercion to induce someone to take actions that are not in the best interests of themselves or the organization.

Job scams are a rising form of socially engineered cybercrime. And while it’s easy to imagine the trouble they cause individuals who innocently fall for them (lost opportunities, identity theft, financial loss, and so on) this form of fraud also affects businesses.

If your organization uses Microsoft Teams, then you definitely want to hear about a new way bad actors are exploiting this newly discovered cyber attack tool. "TeamsPhisher," a new tool recently discovered on GitHub, gives cybercriminals a new way to deliver malicious files directly to any Teams user. The genesis of this new cyber attack tool was published by the US Navy Red Team due to a recently discovered vulnerability in Microsoft Teams.