#7. The need to re-forge the weakest link in the security chain

Many of the high profile targeted attacks that we have analyzed this year have started by ‘hacking the human’. They use social engineering techniques to trick individuals who work for an organization into doing something that jeopardizes corporate security.  People are susceptible to such approaches for various reasons. 

They frame their approaches to employees using data that they’re able to gather from a company web site, public forums and by sifting through the various snippets of information that people post in social networks. This helps them to generate e-mails that look legitimate and catch people off-guard. The same approach is also adopted by those behind the mass of random, speculative attacks that make up the majority of cybercriminal activities – the phishing messages sent out in bulk to large numbers of consumers. This is especially true for targeted attacks, where cybercriminals develop exploit code to make use of unpatched application vulnerabilities, or create custom modules to help them steal data from their victims.

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