When it comes to cybersecurity, we are often our own worst enemies. According to Cisco, almost 90% of data breaches were due to social engineering. This indicates that humans are a significant factor in some way for most successful cyberattacks against global brands.

Brand impersonation does not happen for attackers without access to crucial social media platforms, credential information, or privileged access from the target. Cybercriminals have gotten clever in approaching access to online platforms and using a variety of tricks and tactics to convince well-intentioned people to turn over access to intellectual property, social media accounts, and other sensitive information.

When these tricks fail, they use technological solutions to bypass security controls and steal what they need. That is why attacks that focus on human errors form the foundation or attacks that lead to brand impersonation attacks.

Common Tactics

When launching a brand attack, cybercriminals work from a familiar playbook. They know they must resort to trickery to get access, so their episodes are surprisingly similar.

Social Engineering

Social engineering attacks trick users into making lousy security decisions by leveraging psychological manipulation. Attackers using social engineering use emotions, trust, and the tendency of individuals to comply with requests. They use deception and manipulation to play on these motivations. They trick individuals into divulging sensitive information or risky actions such as clicking on a link or opening an attachment.

Social engineering attacks come in wide varieties and are challenging to detect as they rely on exploiting an individual rather than any digital vulnerability. These attacks can come from emails, phone calls, texts, websites, or in-person conversations. Preventing these attacks is more challenging as they capitalize on human awareness and emotions, and one person’s off day can lead to a massive incident for an entire organization.

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