Imagine a call or voice message that appears to come from a trusted source, such as your bank, credit card company, or from a company that you had recent purchase from like Best Buy or Apple store. In reality, it is a disguised attempt to compromise your identity, credentials, or financial information.
Social Engineering is EVER evolving!
Though it sounds like an awesome degree, social engineering is a method where cybercriminals make direct contact through phone calls, emails, or even in person. We get tricked into performing a cybercrime such as a fund transfer fraud, give away security information, or gain security access.
According to the Forbes article, there’s another clever fraud tactic that’s been picking up by the bad actors and hackers that we need to watch out for.
A form of social engineering threat, “vishing” is a highly effective and targeted form of phishing that uses voice as a means to lure victims into disclosing private information. Users have gotten reasonably good at spotting scam emails, and popular email systems help detect these efforts’ email items. However, fraud and scams do not stop at tricky emails. Scammers now exploit social media networks, online file-sharing systems, messaging platforms and applications, and phone systems. Compared to email, these channels of opportunity are highly personalized and focused on sharing.
Just like ransomware kits off the shelf, scammers also leverage sophisticated and ready-to-launch phishing kits, including social, voice, email, and enterprise channels. With a bit of time and dedication, an attacker can choose the target(s) of choice, personalize, mimicking login portals, official company pages, and web pages. Information is easy to get from publicly sourced data and black market where information of ours are constantly being sold as we go about living our lives and making purchases or running our business.
At first, you could tell or catch by the vibe and content of the email that it may be a scam and not an email from an actual prince in a faraway land. These threats are constantly evolving and proving to be a lucrative operation. Cybersecurity threats are growing every day. Not only businesses but individuals are also affected by it as we all utilize the internet and enjoy digital conveniences.
It is so important to have cyber awareness and keep up with all the technology threats as the dark web is ever-evolving along with the accelerated digital era we reside in. With holiday times being around the corner, we need to ensure that as we make personal and professional purchases, we are mindful of these ‘VISHING’ scams and stay calm and not react immediately without processing the information, reacting immediately to the phone call or an email from your financial institution.