Social Engineering Testing Services
Test Your Personnel Against Their Susceptibility to Deception
Artifice Security is the leading penetration testing company for electronic social engineering and physical social engineering assessments. Our expert security consultants have performed social engineering engagements for every industry, including government agencies, military branches, and Fortune 500 companies. When you want the best social engineers in the game, Artifice Security stands at the top.
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What is Social Engineering?
To help train your staff on recognizing, reporting, and stopping social engineering attacks, you need a third-party vendor to perform social engineering against your company in a controlled fashion. This assessment helps gauge your organization’s overall risk to social engineering and lets you know where training is required.
what we do
What Does Artifice Security Provide for Social Engineering?
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Types of Social Engineering Attacks
Social engineering attacks are the most common attack vectors against organizations. According to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report and viewing data from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, social engineering accounts for 70%-90% of all successful data breaches. These successful data breaches are due to malicious actors being more successful at breaching networks through social engineering than traditional exploitation of external networks and web applications.
Recognizing a social engineering attack is one of the best methods to protect your business. Here are the most common social engineering attacks that we’ve seen in the past few years:
01. Phishing
Phishing typically involves sending emails that try to reach as many people as possible and aren’t too specific for anyone. There are, however, a few varieties of phishing that focus on particular targets.
- Spear Phishing – Spear phishing targets specific people or groups inside a company. It’s a dangerous variation of phishing that leverages emails, social media, instant messaging, and other platforms to persuade users to reveal personal information or take activities that compromise networks, cause data loss, or result in financial loss. While traditional phishing techniques employ sending out bulk emails to random people, spear phishing focuses on specific targets and requires more research by the attacker.
- Whaling – Whaling involves targeting the executives at the organization, such as the CEO, VP, CFO, and other high-profile targets, as they are considered the “large fish” of the organization.
02. Vishing and Smishing
The caller frequently threatens or scares the victim into providing personal information or money. Vishing scams like this usually target the elderly, but anybody without training may fall victim to one.
Smishing (short for SMS phishing) is comparable to and uses the same strategies as email phishing and vishing, except it uses SMS/text messaging instead of email.
03. Pretexting
A malicious actor may mimic corporate executives, auditors, investigators, or any other persona they feel would assist them in obtaining the information they need during this sort of social engineering tactic.
04. Tailgating and Piggybacking
Piggybacking is very similar to tailgating. The critical distinction between the two is that the authorized user is aware of the other person in a piggybacking scenario and allows them to piggyback off their access. A friendly authorized user may feel forced to hold a secure door open for someone carrying a box or a construction worker entering with a ladder.
05. Baiting
06. Quid Pro Quo
methodology
Social Engineering Methodology
01
Define the Scope
- Determine if electronic social engineering, physical social engineering, or both are required
- Outline which users, if any, are exempt from social engineering
- Determine testing dates and times for the social engineering assessment
- Determine what is out of bounds, if anything.
02
Information Gathering / Recon Phase
- Gather domain information and URLs for your organization
- Searches for publicly exposed documents such as PDFs, DOCXs, XLSXs, and PowerPoint documents that may contain sensitive or customer data without your knowledge
- Searches on the Internet and Darkweb for leaked credentials within password breach databases
- Checks to find similar domain names as yours to determine your risk to phishing (threats to domain spoofing)
03
Create Pretext Scenarios
04
Exploitation Phase
Our penetration testers will attempt to bypass physical controls and gain access to each facility in-scope for physical social engineering. Consultants may use tailgating, piggybacking, lockpicking, door bypassing, and RFID cloning.
Electronic
- Launch phishing emails that were pre-approved by your organization
- Lure employees to a customized landing page that ties in with the created pretext
- Capture credentials
- Test external services using the captured credentials to show real-world risks
Physical
- Detect gaps in physical security controls
- Bypass doors, locks, security systems, and cameras
- Clone RFID cards and use the data to create a new RFID card
- Bypass security staff and employees
- Gain access to sensitive areas of the facility such as the server room or other areas specified during the scoping phase
05
Reporting Phase
Artifice Security will gather all information about your organization and social engineering results during the reporting phase.
Reporting begins with an executive summary which gives a layman’s explanation of the steps performed and conveys the overall risk about your organization. In addition to a summary of results, we also provide a list of positive findings found during testing. Next, the report explains how we determine criticality and risk for each vulnerability so you can better understand what to prioritize for remediation and how we rate severity for each finding.
Further in the report, we break down the social engineering results and steps in technical detail, including a summary of the finding, affected users, proofs-of-concept, and remediation steps.
In addition to the report, Artifice Security also provides you with a customer-facing report and attestation letter if needed.
- Executive Summary that easily conveys risk
- Vulnerabilities rated by criticality
- Detailed walkthrough showing how we performed each social engineering step
- Best practice remediation steps that are customized and realistic based on your current environment
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most common social engineering test that customers want?
On average, we find that targeted users open more than 30% of phishing messages for phishing social engineering, with 12% of those users clicking on the malicious link or attachment. As organizations continue their social engineering training, this number radically drops after performing additional testing with them.
When you are performing phishing, what should we say to our staff if they call us about your phishing email?
What are the benefits of a social engineering assessment?
Which employees should be tested?
In an ideal situation, all of the employees should be tested. This way, we can give you a complete statistic on how many employees are vulnerable to social engineering.
There may be instances when specific workers cannot be included in a social engineering penetration test, but all remaining employees should be considered prospective targets. An attacker will seldom target all workers because doing so raises the chances of being discovered. Our social engineering penetration testing specialists will choose targets from the list to recreate these settings if there is a reason why all employees cannot be targeted.