A Sunny Afternoon Of A California Bank

Security and ethical employees will continue to be a vital aspect of ensuring the success of an organization. There will always be a need for ethical IT security professional as hackers will continue to force organizations to make adjustments in their business models to protect their employees, data and customers. Many organizations and managers believe application security requires simply installing a perimeter firewall, or taking a few configuration measures to prevent applications or operating systems from being attacked. This is a risky misconception. By understanding threats and respect impacts, organizations will be equipped to maintain confidentiality, availability and

Modern organizations that utilize technology must now use their resources to protect themselves from malicious cybercrime activities. A “hacker” could illegally intrude into an organizations information network and use accounting software to mine information and steal assets at a relatively low risk of being caught.

As such, our company’s people resources pose the greatest risk for security breach. Our way to help mitigate risk in this area is to keep communication lines open in this area and to continually mandate security knowledge training, with mandatory updates on a regular basis. When the employees are informed of company policy when facing a security matter, they are better equipped to act in the best or right way. In this way knowledge is power – or at least empowerment to act in the best interest of the company’s information security.

• Authored cyber defense and awareness, social engineering, and cover training content for the Executive Office of the President

It is recommended that we conduct a test that would simulate that breach. The test results should be anonymous as the goal of the test is to improve the company's security posture in a way that improves the entire company's security. After the test is complete, the results should be used to assist in designing training for employees on understanding and dealing with potential social engineering attacks. After developing the training, new policies and procedures should be disseminated, then the training can include understanding and reviewing the new policies and procedures. After the training is completed another test should be done to measure engagement and effectiveness of the social engineering training. This information should be used to improve training. The goal of the training would be to empower employees with situational awareness skills that would assist them in identifying potential social engineering attempts and how to respond

The data breaches at Target, Home Depot are reminders to CIOs of how deadly social engineering can be. CIO’s and CSO’s realize the dangers of security problems on a massive scale. These are some deliberate security breaches that happen when an employee shares a password or loses a mobile device. An employee might access a website at work that loads malware onto his PC, which then spreads throughout the corporate network. In other cases, security breaches occur when a disgruntled employee leaves the company and takes with him valuable intellectual property that belongs to the company.

Over the last few years the amount of security breaches that have been reported have had one factor that has been prevalent in majority of the attacks. That factor is the employee’s and how they are manipulated into giving the intruder/hacker exactly what they needed without realizing it. The use of social engineering in data breaches and fraud has been steadily increasing over the years. Confidentiality, integrity, and availability the three components of the CIA triad in network security can all be compromised by the risk of social engineering.

With the dramatic development in the technology of computers and communications, the entire world has certainly benefited a great deal, but the purchase price of computers might also be very expensive. Computer crimes are now becoming very serious problems that are costing as much as billions of dollars. Also, computer crimes are threatening the continuing future of communication, confidentiality, and even the integrity of businesses and organizations.

Social Engineering has become a career for modern day cyber criminals. Thieves are waiting to prey on the vulnerable, and naïve. The situations, as devastating as they are to the victims, are very real. In some cases, unfortunately, the cybercrimes are life-altering and irreparable. This paper will highlight four real-life cases where social engineering techniques were used to obtain personal and corporate information.

In 2014, one the country’s largest home improvement companies Home Depot was attacked by hackers. The hackers used a vendor’s stolen log-on credentials to penetrate through the company’s network and installed a custom built malware that stole credit card data and email addresses. The attack allowed the hackers to gain access to 56 million credit and debit cards in the US and Canada, and another 53 million e-mail address were also stolen.

The worse attack on the United States computer network took place in 2008. The Deputy of Secretary of Defense, William J. Lynn III, described the event as a “network administrator’s worst fear: a rouge program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary” (Lynn, 2010). The common thought that comes to mind when we think of an attack on a network infrastructure is that the attack is a complex attack coordinated by some “black hat ” hacker/cracker that had to decipher lines of code and encrypted algorithm to penetrate the United States network infrastructure. However, the most common attack and the most devastating attack to infect the United States network was a simple social engineering attack.

Reconnaissance – Attackers may depend on social engineering to gain information, access, and data to a companies inner-working; This include finding out policies, office building security protocols; even dumpster diving for any information that could be used to initiate a scanning procedure. Counter measures for these methods include, enforcing employees to comply with security policies, constantly train employees in the methods of social engineering by attackers; this includes over the phone conversations subjecting an employee into disclosing any type of company information, no matter how innocent the information may seem (an alternative excuse for employees is to refer to company’s website), installation of security cameras, and use

Social Engineering as defined by IT professionals is the practice of deceiving someone, either in person, over the phone or using a computer, with the express intent of breaching some level of security, either personal or professional (Ledford, 2011.) Implementing quality risk analysis solutions while maintaining data integrity is a crucial element of successful system modeling; within the context of social engineering in the workplace, there are several factors that can make implementing those solutions rather challenging. Social engineering is a type of

The analysis of 2,260 breaches and more than 100,000 incidents at 67 organizations in 82 countries shows that organizations are still failing to address basic issues and well-known attack methods. The (DBIR, 2016) shows, for example, that nearly two-thirds of confirmed data breaches involved using weak, default or stolen passwords. Also shows that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that organizations have never patched, despite patches being available for months – or even years – with the top 10 known vulnerabilities accounting for 85% of successful exploit “Organizations should be investing in training to help employees know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, and

The potential of violations can come from numerous sources (Lawrence & Weber, 2011) (Consumer Information). Recently Equifax had a data breach of their customer’s personal information. The hackers accessed the names, social security numbers, birthdates, and addresses of 142 million American consumers (Consumer Information). This is frightening and happens more often that we think. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers executive, ”Cybercrime has emerged as a formidable threat. Over the years millions have fallen victim to theses attacks. In a survey of 583 U.S. companies, 90 percent said that hackers breached their company’s computers over the last twelve months (Lawrence & Weber, 2011). Cyber crimes occur when hackers attempt to damage or destroy a computer network or system of company’s data. Criminals will use one of the most harmful systems around. This system is called a zombie. A zombie is