Social Engineering is one of a number of cybercrime activities that pose a large threat to society. Simply described as an act of tricking or manipulating someone into divulging information or taking an action. You can imagine the difficulty in trying to determine how you can protect people from this form of attack.
As we can see in the security markets, the initial answer to solving this is user education. This is evident with the number of businesses that have switched their focus to security education services capitalising business impacts and the need to close security vulnerabilities. While these training services are valuable for the business and individual receiving the training, it does focus directly at businesses leaving consumers and end users with little focused training on protecting themselves from Social Engineering attacks.
Having said that, there are a few great resources online we have come across which include the following where consumers and end users can learn more about Security and Social Engineering.
The challenge of education is the amount of information an end user needs to retain in order to protect their personal data and identity. Certainly positioning a user in an improved position, as the attacks become more sophisticated, so does the training requirements. This does increase the risk of the end user making a mistake or missing a process step.
Education is important in attempting to prevent Social Engineering attacks however its not the only way. Fundamentally Social Engineering attacks are successful due to the receiver not being able to verify the identity of the attacker. Coupled with an interaction invoking urgency, fear, greed, curiosity the user is at the mercy of the attacker.
At Guard Point we focused on trying to solve the identity aspect of a Social Engineering attack to provide the user with a mechanism to gain confidence and control during an interaction. The gap between user education and user knowledge failure is closed when businesses and consumers utilise Guard Point. Guard Point tools and processes allow the users/consumers to take control and actively protect their information with verifiable data.