Deceptive Social Engineering Attacks to Assess Your Organization’s Cyber Security Posture | Targeted and Focused Spear Phishing Capabilities to identify the vulnerabilities in the human chain
Social Engineering Assessments Methodology
Email spear phishing is a carefully planned and focused cyber-attack that attempts to compromise a specific target through an email asking for their personal information. Attackers can easily leverage public information about the target to craft a very convincing email, often while impersonating an individual or organization they trust.
Email spear phishing is one of the most effective ways to compromise an organization’s security. Di8it rely on a full-scale, multi-vector attack to identify the vulnerabilities in the human chain. Each assessment is tailored to your organization and isn’t just another automated tool or service. The reason these attacks are so effective, unlike traditional phishing attacks, is because attackers go to great lengths to establish a level of credibility with the specific target. They then convince them to surrender critical, private information such as passwords and PINs.
Email Spear Phishing Assessment Methodology
- Define Scope
- Information Gathering
- Create Pretext Scenarios/Payloads
- Engage Targets
- Reporting
- Employee Education
The first step in any assessment is defining its scope and determining what is a legitimate target, and what is off-limits. Clear and effective communication in this phase makes the rest of the assessment go smoother and we get better results.
The next and most critical step is intelligence gathering and recon. We use our resources to gather as much data about our target as we can, while our analysts and security experts go through the information with a fine-toothed comb, extracting crucial intelligence. The more accurate the intel is, the more successful the assessment.
Once we have sufficient intel and the targets are marked, we move towards crafting the payload and formulating the plan of attack. We identify specific departments, user roles, and associated pretext scenarios that we’ll be hitting.
Once the plan is ready and all the pieces are in place, we begin the attack. Our analysts engage the target employees with carefully crafted emails with links or attachments, all of which are carefully designed to mimic authentic websites and services. As soon as the target downloads the malicious file or provides the necessary information through the link, we systematically begin compromising the target as per the scope of the assessment.
Once the attack is ceased, we formulate an assessment report, along with detailed documentation about the specifics of the attack to help your internal security determine the extent of the vulnerability. We also provide remediation strategies and suggestions that can be implemented to plug in the security holes. We can also provide training guides for your employees if needed.
Di8it also offers training sessions for your employees if needed to help them identify phishing attempts in the future and how to be more secure online. Along with recorded webinars, we can also conduct in-house training sessions as per the client’s requirements.
Integrate with other Assessments
While we offer Social Engineering Phishing Assessment to our clients as a standalone Service, we recommend combining it with our offensive Security Services for optimal threat intelligence. In real-world scenarios, attackers will use any means necessary to breach your security and any chain is only as strong as its weakest link.