Social engineering is the primary cause of cyberattacks today, so it is critical to keep your team informed of the latest social engineering threat trends. Cyber thieves are leveraging these trends to directly commit fraud, harvest credentials or install malware.

Despite the best efforts of your company’s workers, cybercriminals continue to steal, defraud and ransom companies for billions of dollars annually. As soon as new defenses are created and put into place, these criminals find ways to defeat them. It is a constant battle.

Decision makers have strengthened defenses around physical and cloud-based infrastructure, but it’s people who are the most reliable and easiest entry point to compromise.

Social Engineering Suppresses Our Instincts

Something isn’t right… That’s the feeling you get when something is too good to be true or something is suspicious. Social engineering attempts to bypass or short circuit this response by presenting you with something familiar, compelling or even frightening.

Gone are the days when you can tell an email is fake just by looking at it. Now social engineering threat trends include using familiar logos and designs that may seem identical to real emails you receive daily. A threat actor might even pretend to be an authority figure at your company, like a manager or CEO, to give their request more urgency.

Any topic that is of significant social interest can also suppress our better instincts. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a massive desire for prevention and treatment information. Threat actors took advantage of that desire and created COVID-19-related content people could be lured to act on.