What are social engineering attacks?
Social engineering is an attack technique that focuses on exploiting an enterprise’s employees. In a typical social engineering scenario, cybercriminals may trick or deceive employees into ignoring security protocols, making them unwitting collaborators in cyberattacks.
To see why social engineering attacks are a hot topic now, look no further than Verizon's research: A whopping 68% of data breaches in 2024 had a human element, continuing the concerning trend from 2023. The same report also highlights that social engineering is a leading attack pattern across most major industries.
If social engineering attacks weren’t problematic enough, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have heightened their potency. With AI, malicious actors can now better impersonate legitimate entities and deploy fake text, audio, and video communications at a greater speed and scale.
But as dangerous as these attacks sound, it's not all doom and gloom. All businesses need to do to keep their employees safe is prioritize social engineering awareness and mitigation—and use a few helpful cloud security tools along the way.
How do social engineering attacks work?
Most cyberattacks exploit technical vulnerabilities. In the cloud, that includes excessive permissions, unpatched applications, or misconfigured APIs and storage buckets. Social engineering attacks are a whole different ball game. They exploit psychological vulnerabilities, which are more difficult to pinpoint and address.
Sometimes, threat actors use social engineering attacks to directly obtain sensitive information or money. But in most cases, social engineering attacks are a stepping stone in a larger attack plan. That's why it's often seen as an attack technique rather than a standalone attack. Social engineering is a way to launch attacks like malware, ransomware, and credential theft. Since these kinds of attacks are technically difficult to conduct, cybercriminals employ social engineering to avoid doing the hard parts.
Here are a few common social engineering tactics that threat actors use:
Impersonating a higher authority like law enforcement, government organizations, or tax agencies to demand sensitive information or even money
Using an established company's name, logo, or website to trick victims into sharing information or conducting transactions
Impersonating a senior leader from the victim's company like a CEO or a CISO to gain insider information or access privileges
Presenting a fake reward or monetary price in exchange for sensitive or personal data
Sharing spoofed links disguised as feedback forms, surveys, or quizzes
Types of social engineering attacks
Phishing
One of the most common forms of social engineering, phishing attacks involve sending messages to targets to try to trick them into downloading malware, dishing out sensitive data, or routing finances to malicious accounts. There are many different kinds of phishing attacks, including email-based phishing, voice phishing or vishing, SMS phishing or smishing, pop-up phishing, spearphishing (when a threat actor targets a specific individual), and whaling (when targets are high-profile professionals).
Real-world example: The most notorious phishing attack occurred between 2013 and 2015 when a threat actor sent fake invoices to Google and Facebook. Damages exceeded $100 million. If multinational giants like Google and Facebook can become victims of phishing attacks, anyone can.
Pretexting
Pretexting involves creating a fake problem to offer a fake solution. In this form of social engineering, malicious actors reach out to targets with a problem that they can solve. Notifying a target about a data breach or security event is a common pretexting scenario. In a panic to resolve a bogus security issue, targets often share credentials or some form of access, letting threat actors infiltrate enterprise IT environments.
Tailgating
Tailgating has two forms: physical and digital. Physical tailgating involves a malicious actor shadowing authorized personnel or pretending to be a legitimate entity to gain access to a private IT ecosystem. (Think offices and data centers.) Digital tailgating follows the same principle but involves threat actors slipping into an organization’s digital infrastructure by accessing unattended enterprise endpoints like a mobile device or a laptop.
Watering hole attacks
In watering hole attacks, instead of directly manipulating victims, cybercriminals manipulate websites that an organization's employees frequently use. They may embed malware via HTML or JavaScript into a website and wait until a target accidentally introduces the malicious payload into their device. Once the device is infected, the threat actor can then escalate attacks, move laterally, and exfiltrate data without anyone noticing.
Scareware
Scareware is yet another tactic that involves creating a fake issue and then offering an antidote. In these attacks, threat actors often create pop-up bombs, which are web pages that erupt into dozens of pop-ups. If you’re wondering, it looks exactly like a virus. Even if these pop-ups aren't dangerous themselves, they manipulate victims into downloading fake antivirus software, which then allows threat actors to deliver more dangerous payloads.
Business email compromise
What can be more convincing than a message from a colleague from a professional business email ID? That's what makes business email compromise such a dangerous social engineering tactic. By spoofing an official business email ID, threat actors can create the ultimate aura of legitimacy. They can trick employees from the same organization or try to exploit third-party vendors, customers, and affiliates.
Real-world example: In an extremely unfortunate event, scammers used the business email compromise tactic to steal $650,000 from a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization called One Treasure Island. Cybercriminals used email IDs similar to those of One Treasure Island's bookkeeper to appear legitimate and steal large amounts of money. The moral of the story? No one is safe from social engineering attacks, not even nonprofits.
Quid pro quo
Take something, give something back. That's the age-old principle behind quid pro quo attacks. In this social engineering tactic, malicious actors pretend to offer useful services in exchange for slivers of access rights and personal information that they can then use to scale their attacks. Examples of fake services in quid pro quo attacks include free software trials, IT support, premium media content, free downloads, and limited-offer memberships.
Diversion theft
Diversion theft is a sneakily simple social engineering tactic. Cybercriminals use this tactic when their crosshairs are on specific data. They trick employees of an organization into sending that data to a spoofed email address that typically belongs to a reputed organization (like banks, auditing firms, or other financial organizations). With diversion theft, you'll typically see crossovers with other tactics like business email compromise.
How to detect and prevent social engineering attacks
Social engineering attacks in cloud environments target users and administrators to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. The cloud’s scalable, dynamic nature makes it especially vulnerable to these attacks, requiring a multi-layered approach for detection and prevention.
Detecting Social Engineering Attacks in the Cloud
1. Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)
Leverage Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) tools to monitor and respond to cloud-specific threats in real time. CDR solutions offer deep visibility into cloud environments by analyzing API calls, user behavior, and configuration changes to detect anomalies such as privilege escalations or mass data access.
Integrate CDR with SIEM and UEBA to:
Identify unusual login locations or times.
Detect abnormal resource access patterns and new account creations with elevated privileges.
Correlate cloud activity with known threat indicators (IoCs).
2. Email Threat Detection in Cloud Platforms
Employ cloud-based email security solutions like Microsoft Defender for Office 365 or Google Workspace Security to detect phishing emails targeting cloud service credentials.
Integrate these with Cloud SIEM systems for better correlation and visibility across email, identity, and cloud application logs.
3. Cloud Access Monitoring
Monitor IAM policies and permissions to detect changes that could indicate a social engineering attack, such as unauthorized role escalation or newly granted privileges.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) help identify unauthorized cloud service usage and control data flow.
4. Threat Intelligence Integration
Enrich cloud monitoring with threat intelligence feeds that focus on cloud-related social engineering tactics and indicators of compromise (IoCs).
Correlate cloud activity with global threat intelligence to identify patterns of spear-phishing or credential-stuffing campaigns.
Preventing Social Engineering Attacks in the Cloud
1. Identity and Access Management Best Practices
Zero Trust Access: Verify every access attempt using multi-factor authentication (MFA), device posture checks, and contextual information like user location.
Just-in-Time Access (JIT): Reduce the attack surface by granting temporary access only when needed.
Phishing-Resistant MFA: Use FIDO2 security keys or authenticator apps to reduce the effectiveness of credential-based social engineering attacks.
2. Security Awareness Training Tailored for Cloud
Tailored Employee Security Awareness Training
Cloud-Specific Scenarios: Focus on real-world attack methods targeting cloud users and administrators. Examples include:
Consent Phishing: Attackers trick users into granting permissions to a malicious third-party cloud app that mimics trusted services, compromising sensitive data.
Malicious OAuth Tokens: Phishing emails that prompt users to sign in with their cloud account (e.g., Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), giving attackers persistent access without a password.
Fake Cloud Service Alerts: Simulate attacks where employees receive fake login alerts from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, prompting them to "reset" their password.
Interactive Simulations: Move beyond basic phishing tests with cloud-specific attack simulations, such as unauthorized access attempts to shared cloud storage or impersonation attacks targeting DevOps engineers.
Gamification and Metrics: Use gamified training platforms that reward employees for detecting threats and provide detailed metrics on improvement areas.
3. Email and Collaboration Security in Cloud Platforms
Configure anti-phishing, anti-spoofing, and data loss prevention (DLP) settings in cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Use DMARC, SPF, and DKIM to protect your domain from spoofing and impersonation.
4. Cloud Resource Segmentation
Use role-based access control (RBAC) and resource segmentation to prevent lateral movement in the event of a compromised account.
Segment cloud environments by sensitivity level, ensuring that even if an account is compromised, access to critical data is restricted.
How Wiz helps detect and respond to social engineering threats
Wiz offers several capabilities to help detect and respond to social engineering threats in cloud environments:
Advanced threat detection: Wiz Defend provides comprehensive threat detection across the cloud infrastructure, including thousands of built-in detection rules regularly updated by the Wiz Research Team. This enables identification of suspicious activities that may result from social engineering attacks.
Cloud-native anomaly detection: Wiz employs cloud-native behavioral analytics to surface abnormal activity in the environment, which can help identify potential compromises stemming from social engineering.
Runtime protection: The Wiz Sensor, an eBPF-based runtime sensor, monitors cloud workloads in real-time to detect and block threats without impacting performance. This can help catch malicious actions resulting from successful social engineering attempts.
Identity detection and response: Wiz can detect anomalies in user behavior and access patterns that may indicate compromised credentials or unauthorized access resulting from social engineering.
Data detection and response: The platform can identify unusual access to sensitive data, which may occur if an attacker gains access through social engineering tactics.
Contextualized alerts: Wiz provides full code-to-cloud context for detections, allowing security teams to quickly assess the severity and potential impact of social engineering-related incidents.
Automated response: Wiz offers automated containment workflows and integrations with existing security tools to streamline the response process for potential social engineering compromises
Threat intelligence: The Wiz Threat Center provides insights into emerging cloud-native attacker tactics, including social engineering techniques, to help organizations stay ahead of threats.
By combining these capabilities, Wiz enables organizations to more effectively detect, investigate, and respond to social engineering threats targeting their cloud environments.
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