Why Preventing Social Engineering Isn’t Enough

The heightened state of cyber-attacks in recent years has put a lot of focus on preventing those attacks from being successful. But, organizations can’t simply rely on defensive strategies to stay secure.

Prevention within a security strategy is largely about putting up defenses that watch and wait for an attack – looking for actions, patterns, and behaviors that match up with what a given solution thinks is inappropriate. Certainly, responsive actions are taken to stop the attack, rendering it useless.

But, it’s important to acknowledge that no solution – whether it be antivirus, application whitelisting, an email gateway, and countless other solution types – is 100% foolproof. The rise in the use of evasive malware techniques is cause for concern.

These techniques are designed to help malware avoid being detected by even the most advanced countermeasures – they include fileless injection of code directly into memory, evaluating the environment before running, and taking multiple steps to obfuscate, bury, and otherwise make detection of malicious code impossible.

Because prevention is only a part of the security equation, organizations today need to  embrace the need for visibility into not just when cyberattacks occur, but also why. This is all important so that response teams can identify the last part of the equation – how to make security better so an attack doesn’t happen again.

So, how can you achieve the needed visibility?

There are a number of ways that provide insight into an attack, as well as where in your organization are you still vulnerable.

  • Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solutions look at security from an organization-wide perspective, providing visibility into not just which endpoints have been compromised, but can, in many cases, actually build out the chain of events to allow response teams to quickly investigate and respond to attacks.
  • GDR Group’s Security Awareness Training & Testing allows GDR Group to  train your employees, creating a security-centric mindset within the employee. Our Phishing & testing of employees puts the spotlight on your organization’s weakest points, using additional training to shore up those employees that put the organization at risk.

Prevention + Visibility = Better Security

There’s no argument that prevention is an important and necessary part of the security equation. What’s critical is to have visibility into where that security is falling short. The use of solutions and services that – in addition to providing security – give insight into what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do about it will help to make your security stance even stronger.

Cyber-attacks are rapidly getting more sophisticated. GDR Group will help train your employees to better manage the urgent IT security problems of social engineering, spear-phishing and ransomware attacks. Take the first step now and email [email protected] to request a quote for security awareness training for your organization.