It is rightly said that the weakest link, even in a most cyber-secure environment, is the human being which renders the entire organisation as vulnerable as the weakest link. Playing games with the human mind and manipulating human thinking and psychology is extremely easy; hence, the human being is the lowest asset in a secure cyber environment.
Affinity phishing scams are ones in which criminals cultivate trust in their prospective victims by trading on common background, either real or feigned. Thus a fraudster might claim a common religion, a shared military background, membership in a profession, or a common ethnicity, all with the goal convincing the victim that they can be trusted. What follows all too often one can readily imagine.
New insights from cybersecurity artificial intelligence (AI) company Darktrace shows a 135% increase in novel social engineering attacks from Generative AI. This new form of social engineering that contributed to this increase is much more sophisticated in nature, using linguistics techniques with increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length to trick their victim. We've recently covered ChatGPT scams and other various AI scams, but this attack proves to be very different.
We all know about the attacker who leverages their technical expertise to infiltrate protected computer systems and compromise sensitive data. This type of malicious actor ends up in the news all the time. But they’re not the only ones making headlines. So too are “social engineers,” individuals who use phone calls and other media to exploit human psychology and trick people into handing over access to the organization’s sensitive information.
Social engineering cyberattacks play on the mind, manipulating emotions and engaging in deception to get victims to give up passwords, financial data, and other valuable information. According to Verizon's 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), eight in 10 data breaches (82%) involve a human element. Alongside breaches caused by human error and malicious actions, this statistic also includes social engineering attacks.
