Updated: Mar 15, In this context of mixing professional and personal life, it is sometimes more complicated for employees to respect the security rules established by the company. Long considered the "weakest link" in corporate security, employees are finally the first line of defence against cyber attacks on a company. What if it was time for companies to reintegrate the human factor into their cybersecurity policy?
Indeed, cyber attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Until recently, it was enough to check the correct spelling of an e-mail, its sender, etc. Today, cyber attackers use a new formidable weapon: social engineering. Social engineering is a technique used by hackers to establish a relationship of trust with the person they are trying to attack, in order to obtain enough personal information email address, postal address, telephone number, contract or customer account number to carry out an attack.
Jessica Clark, an American ethical hacker and the winner of one of the Defcon challenges, proved this. In this video from 1'20'' , Jessica Clark uses the personal information of the journalist's wife who is interviewing her i.
This attack technique is widespread, and uses human weaknesses to achieve its ends, hence the growing need to train and educate employees. Read more about social engineering and FOVI. We might think: "yes, but software and anti-virus solutions exist to protect us against cyber attacks". And indeed, software solutions can secure a company's activity, but only partially. Take the example of phishing emails: some are easily recognisable due to spelling or grammatical errors, URLs with misleading domain names, a suspicious sender name, or a message asking for money or personal data, etc.
However, phishing attacks today are much more sophisticated, much more elaborate and thus more deceptive. If such phishing emails get past the anti-virus barrier, the last line of defence is the employee who receives the deceptive email in front of his or her screen. It is then necessary that they are sufficiently trained to be suspicious and to be able to recognise the attempted attack.
