Social Engineering

On top of all the rest of our daily concerns, we have to worry about Social Engineering cyber attacks. This form of attack takes place not only in our work environment, but in our personal life as well. Most occur at our workplace and can come from a co-worker. From shoulder surfing to someone who inadvertently shares a malicious email. Employers are having to mandate cyber-security training. Training focused on how Social Engineering can manipulate you into a mistake.

The cyber attacker’s goal?

What are the attackers trying to achieve? Ultimately it‘s about access. Access to information or access to a facility. To me personally, it is hard to fathom the idea. The idea being pursued to gain access to my personal – or to my employer’s – data. It makes me think I am in some fictional spy movie. I think the general population believes they are not at risk. The perception is “I don’t have anything of real value”. This opinion is wrong the Human Error is the majority of the issue. Every person has data that is valuable to a hacker. If your credentials are the ones that that lead to a breach they were valuable.

Human error – the most common weak link

he issue is the majority are overwhelmed by the sheer number of passwords we have. Therefore we do not use best practices related to Password Protection. In the 2012 Dropbox Data Breach, access was gained from an employee’s password that was stolen during the LinkedIN breach. The LinkedIN breach leaked 117 million usernames and passwords. The attackers then reused those credentials or variations of them. See the written by Joseph Chukwube, who provides a deeper insight to this topic.

So how do we protect ourselves?

Here at TraitWare® we are working to eliminate the primary target of these types of attacks – the Username and Password. We have designed a secure login for WordPress and SAML-based enterprise access, along with other web-based login platforms. TraitWare® has achieved true MFA access via a mobile device through our solution inside the TraitWare® app. TraitWare®’s app provides multi-factor authentication to applications and resources across devices, such as a PC or workstation (QR scan) and on a single mobile device (Direct Login).

For more information about how you can use TraitWare® to secure your digital resources, please visit our site or contact sales@traitware.com.