The greatest network security threat to your business may already be inside your firewall. You can have the strongest firewall ever built, but all it takes is one naive employee falling for a social engineering scam and suddenly you’re in a world of pain.

What Is A Social Engineering Attack?

Network security breaches resulting from social engineering attacks are on the rise in Kansas City and around the world. Social engineers use various manipulative techniques to trick victims into disclosing sensitive information, which they then use to facilitate their cyber attacks. These techniques include phishing/vishing/smishing, pretexting, baiting, tailgating/piggybacking, and quid pro quo.

Phishing

Most everyone is familiar with \[phishing](https://www.ravenii.com/blog/cyber-security-best-practices-for-preventing-phishing-attacks/) by now. Attackers send fraudulent emails claiming to be from a reputable source and requesting personal information. Generally speaking, phishing scams tend to target as many people as possible, but there are a couple more targeted types.

When an attacker researches a particular user to create a targeted attack, we call it spear phishing. They might comb through your social media to find out where you bank or shop regularly then pretend to be a representative contacting you about a problem with your account. Whaling is like spear phishing, except that it targets “big fish” like CEOs and CFOs.

Vishing/Smishing

Vishing, or voice phishing, is when the attacker tries to trick a victim into giving them computer access or sensitive information over the phone. Smishing, or SMS phishing, is the same but over text messages. The IRS scam that seems to be perpetual is an example of a vishing/smishing scam.

Pretexting

In a pretexting scam, the attacker impersonates someone in a powerful position such as an investigator, auditor, or police officer, and creates a scenario where the victim feels compelled to provide the requested information. 

Baiting

Baiting is exactly what it sounds like - luring victims into a social engineering trap with promises of gifts or prizes if they only provide their credentials. Baiting also includes free downloads or USB drives loaded with malware.

Tailgating and Piggybacking 

Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with sporting events or fun kid games. The tailgating and piggybacking we’re talking about here are both methods of gaining access to a secure area in the physical world.

Tailgating refers to closely following an authorized user into a secure area without being noticed, like by grabbing the door before it latches. Piggybacking is the same except that the authorized user is aware that they’re letting someone in, usually under the ruse of a lost access badge or armloads of boxes.

Quid Pro Quo

Quid pro quo (Latin, meaning ‘something for something’) is when the attacker tries to trade services for information. A quid pro quo scheme might involve an attacker pretending to be a company’s network security officer calling employees and saying they just need their login credentials to fix a security issue.

Network Security Services To Prevent Social Engineering Attacks

RAVENii is a managed security service provider offering multiple solutions to help educate your employees and protect your organization from social engineering attacks in Kansas City and nationwide, including but not limited to:

• Security Awareness & Phishing Training
• Continuous Threat & Vulnerability Management
• SIEM Wave 3
• Managed Endpoint Protection

Security Awareness & Phishing Training

Developing a security-conscious culture within your organization should be a priority for all departments, not IT alone. Having everyone working toward the same goal gives you much greater odds of successfully locking down your data.

A culture of security means that security values and habits are integral to every position within your organization. Creating a culture of security makes every employee your first line of defense against security breaches.

RAVENii’s Managed Security Training and Phishing Testing platform will educate your employees on what cyber threats to look for and provide training on how to avoid them. This service follows best practices for educating your human firewall on how to treat your sensitive data and be security-aware. 

Continuous Threat & Vulnerability Management

How fast can you detect a threat to your environment? RAVENii’s Continuous Threat & Vulnerability Management offering allows you to position your business in a proactive stance. RAVENii will run continuous scans on your environment to identify anomalies in your normal operations.

Any inconsistencies will be evaluated to determine whether or not they pose a risk to your business. These risks will then be communicated to you and together, we will deploy a plan of action to mitigate the threat or vulnerability.

RAVENii’s Continuous Threat & Vulnerability Management Service Includes:

• Regular executive indicator and reporting debriefs
• Vulnerability prioritization and remediation plans
• Real-time attack surface measuring
• Real-time on-the-wire passive vulnerability scanning and threat monitoring
• Real-time indicator of compromise alerting
• Regular active vulnerability scans
• Log collection from Windows, routers & switches, firewalls, Linux and Applications
• Access to RAVENii’s Security Incident Response and Management Team

SIEM Wave 3

How are you patrolling your network to manage and track changes? RAVENii makes security event and log management easy and affordable with our managed SIEM Wave 3 Solution.

SIEM Wave 3 is powered by MixMode and is the only solution on the market utilizing 3rd Wave Artificial Intelligence.

3rd Wave AI has many advantages that solve the business challenges surrounding traditional SIEM solutions like; containing price creep, storing network traffic data volumes, and working with historical information.

The traditional SIEM is a siloed solution. It is expensive to maintain the extraction, transformation, aggregation, and storage of the machine/log data with a traditional SIEM. Network traffic data is the most comprehensive source of useful information for threat detection and response. However, storing its massive data volumes can increase total spend up to 3 times.

The traditional SIEM also requires a lot of manpower. It typically takes 12-24 months of human training, extensive configuration, fine-tuning and monitoring before a traditional SIEM can provide you with true security value.

Traditional SIEMs also rely on historical data. Historical data cannot predict threats or identify anomalies indicative of a forthcoming attack. Historical data is like a rearview mirror; it only gives you a view of what’s behind you.

The advantages of RAVENii’s SIEM Wave 3 Solution over traditional SIEM:

• Precision detection increases SOC productivity
• 95% false positive reduction
• Cost reduction and efficiency gains
• Lower log storage costs
• Shorter mean time to remediate
• Predictive and zero-day attack detection
• 7 days to enterprise deployment and network baseline
• The only 3rd wave AI security tool on the market

The lack of integration with other tools means that IT teams must dedicate significant staff time to managing each security control, and even further time to the administration of the various alerts generated by these tools.

Our solution is self-supervised, context-aware, and predictive. This eliminates the need for IT teams to spend precious time deploying and re-configuring individual products and rules. Instead of LOOKING for actionable events, we are WORKING actionable events.

Managed Endpoint Protection

What are you doing to guard your endpoints? The RAVENii Managed Endpoint Protection Service helps businesses block threats and other attempts to gain access to their networks.

RAVENii will defend all access points with 24/7 monitoring for any malicious activity. The service ensures that the endpoints of security, the client devices, are protected against advanced threats, keeping networks running and corporate assets safe. With RAVENii’s Managed Endpoint Protection Service you can protect your intellectual property, customer data, and reputation. You can also devote more IT resources to your core business.

RAVENii’s Managed Endpoint Protection Service includes:

• Malware Protection
• Internet Filtering
• Device lockdown, alarming and wiping
• Device Tracking and Reclamation
• Remote Assistance
• Regular executive indicator and reporting debriefs
• Access to RAVENii’s Security Incident Response and Management Team
• Anytime/Anywhere management of endpoints

For more information about network security and managed services from RAVENii in Kansas City and nationwide, click here or call (844) 317-0944 today.