Social engineering is a tactic used by cybercriminals to trick individuals into divulging sensitive information or providing access to an organization’s systems or networks. Social engineering attacks can be used to gain access to an organization’s networks, steal personal information, or even cause physical damage. To protect your business, it’s essential to understand the methods used in social engineering attacks and take steps to prevent them from being successful. In this article, we will explore how to protect against social engineering and provide practical tips and best practices for safeguarding your business.
- Train your employees to recognize social engineering tactics, such as phishing, pretexting, baiting, scareware and more.
- Have a clear security policy in place that employees can follow to identify and report suspicious behavior.
- Test your employees with simulated phishing campaigns to gauge their susceptibility to such attacks.
- Use two-factor authentication to secure sensitive systems and data.
- Use software restriction policies or application whitelisting to prevent unauthorized software from running on devices.
- Keep software and systems updated with the latest security patches.
- Regularly back-up your important data and test the integrity of backups to ensure they can be restored.
- Watch out for unusual requests from email, phone, or in-person and always verify requests from a third party.
- Use DMARC, SPF, and DKIM to protect your email.
- Have an incident response plan in place to deal with a potential social engineering attack, this will help you to quickly respond to an attack, contain the damage and restore your systems to normal operations as soon as possible.