As COVID-19 evolves, the priorities of cyberattackers and cybercriminals have completely changed, yes, and now they are forming some innovative ways to attack the weakest link in the security chain. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, cyberattackers were more focused on targeting the technical elements such as firewalls, applications, the cloud, and the internal network; now the entire focus has shifted to the humans or the individual assets belonging to an organization.
Did you know that cybercriminals have more than 15 innovative social engineering approaches and tactics, including phishing, vishing, SMiShing, spear phishing, pretexting, scareware, baiting, malicious attachments, malware, and various other COVID-19 campaigns? Although I know most of you are familiar with a few social engineering attacks that are very common in nature, did you know that the COVID-19 attack campaigns that attackers are inventing and running on the specific targets are completely different and innovative? And it is no wonder to say that your organisation can be another target if the weakest link or employees are not trained as per these specific COVID-19 social engineering attack campaigns.
Since all COVID-19 attack campaigns target the workforce, the only way to combat them is to train your employees, and ordinary training will not help you much as it is not specific to making your workforce aware of the attack campaigns running by cybercriminals these days. Here are a few tips to appropriately train your workforce against these COVID-19 attack campaigns:
The traditional approach to training your workforce will not protect you because all of your employees are not intelligent enough to keep up with the latest attack campaigns and innovative methods of social engineering attacks.
The problem with the traditional training approach is that it’s not updated, and almost 70% of security companies around the world are not giving training with deep explanations on every possible social engineering attack and the innovative ways that the attackers are inventing to execute these attacks in the real world. Did you know that as soon as the COVID-19 crisis hit the headlines in January of this year, cybercriminals began inventing social engineering attack campaign themes? But our organisations weren’t prepared that time, and as a result, they got victimised by these targeted attacks.
To conclude in very simple terms, don’t waste money on irrelevant security awareness training that is not strategic and just for the formalities, as other competitors are also doing. If the purpose of training is not fulfilled, then there is no sense in investing. If employees are still making similar mistakes even after getting trained by a professional trainer, then your organisation is still at high risk. Many organisations choose to train their workforce, but they are not sure how they are verifying that their workforce is not clicking on malicious links, getting stuck in attractive COVID-19 campaigns, or falling for traps run by cybercriminals. Here are some solutions:
You can contact us and speak with one of our subject matter experts to learn more about our advanced social engineering training, which includes an assessment with questions based on real-world scenarios of COVID-19 attack campaigns, phishing traps, and other social engineering attacks.
