Have you heard of the new breed of “Friendly” fraudsters? Trust is an essential component of social engineering. To persuade someone to interact with a piece of malicious content, an attacker has to convince them to trust the source—or at least to suspend distrust long enough to succumb. Over the past year, we’ve seen a growing trend of cyber criminals going to surprising lengths to develop rapport with victims before attempting to initiate an attack.
This is one from the many other findings uncovered in Proofpoint’s The Human Factor 2022 report – the insights of a year’s worth of valuable threat research that culminates from analysis of more than 2.6 billion email messages, 49 billion URLs, 1.9 billion attachments, more than 28 million cloud accounts, 1.7 billion suspicious SMS texts and more.
Watch Andy Rose, Resident CISO at Proofpoint as he talks live to Jenny Radcliffe - a world-renowned Social Engineer, on the new social engineering trends including the evolving relationship between malware distributors and one of the world’s most successful ransomware gangs, and how legitimate cloud services now provide the infrastructure for a majority of malicious activity.