Social Engineering and How to Win the Battle for Trust [Infographic]

John Gunn,

A famous Warren Buffet quote starts with this statement, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it…”

For financial institutions, few things are as potentially damaging as customers suffering losses because of social engineering schemes. These types of attacks undermine consumer confidence in a bank’s brand, put customers at great risk of financial loss, and collectively cost the financial industry countless millions of dollars every year.

Social engineering is certainly not a new problem, but it’s a persistent one that continues to grow, and with seemingly no end in sight. Social engineering preys on a natural human tendency to trust. Hackers are expert at manipulating the human factor and exploiting trust to steal valuable information. They accomplish this by convincing their victims to divulge confidential information or participate unknowingly in fraudulent transactions.

While most financial institutions have taken significant steps to combat social engineering through user education and additional controls for their customers, they still find themselves struggling to identify new attack methods and mitigate the damage. Traditional phishing schemes are increasing in frequency and more targeted spear phishing attacks are as well. As customers migrate to additional channels, hackers are following them with threats such as voice phishing (Vishing) and SMS phishing (SMishing).

Education and enhanced security are the best defenses against hackers and social engineering attacks. To arm you for the battle, we’ve put together this new Social Engineering Infographic designed to help you better understand:

  1. How you’ll be attacked - and what else the hackers have in their bag of tricks.
  2. Who is being targeted - In Q1 of 2015, over 37% attacks were targeted at financial institutions.
  3. How you can gain more control – and what technologies are available to protect you.

The Warren Buffet quote that was started above finishes with these words, “…if you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” So, do things differently and check out the infographic and let us show you how to reduce losses from hackers and social engineering.

Social Engineering Infographic

Mitigating Human Risk in Banking Transactions

By downloading this FREE eBook, you’ll discover The latest social engineering attack methods and How to minimize the risk of social engineering attacks.

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John Gunn is OneSpan’s CMO and brings two decades of leadership experience in the IT security and software segments. Before joining OneSpan, John led the Security Solutions Group at Harland Clarke where he launched a popular SaaS consumer identity protection and anti-fraud solution.