Social Engineering Prevention Techniques

It is estimated that 98% of cyberattacks are launched using social engineering techniques to gather intelligence, gain access to critical information systems, and target exploits where they will hurt an organisation the most. Hackers know that if they can tap into your employees’ inherently good nature and desire to be helpful, they can manipulate them through emotions such as fear, greed, curiosity and urgency, to drive your employees to take actions that provide the social engineer with rapid access to a wealth of sensitive organisational information, that helps them disrupt your operations and wreaks havoc with your service delivery.

In this 60-minute webinar, we deep-dive into the social engineering techniques currently being used against power grid workforces and determine how these are likely to develop in the next 2-3 years. We review a range of cyber awareness programmes, cyber hygiene approaches, and incident response strategies, that are helping proactive power grid cybersecurity leads to outsmart and thwart the social engineers’ efforts. Finally, we determine the most effective multi-layered defence-in-depth approach to combatting next generation social engineering to help you build a more robust human firewall and get ahead of the threat.

By upgrading your workforce cyber awareness so that your people are able to intuitively strike the mindset balance between how things can made to work versus how things may be made to fail, you will be able to transform your workforce from the weakest link, to the strongest link, in your cybersecurity strategy.

• Understanding where social engineering fits within a broader cyberattack framework in the context of national critical infrastructure
• Determining the psychological profile of the highly skilled social engineer and the traits they look for to exploit in their victim pool
• Evaluating how specific social engineering techniques are evolving to maximise their effectiveness within the power grid environment: phishing, spear phishing, watering hole, pretexting, baiting

Valerian Rossigneux has over 13 years of experience in fighting hackers in the European and Asian region. As a seasoned risk practitioner, Val knows the threat vectors and understands how they operate enabling him to design security strategies to stop breaches. Val is currently working as a Security Architect at Crowdstrike, the leading Cloud-Delivered Endpoint security platform.

• Identifying the internal and external drivers for launching a social engineering awareness programme across the organisation
• Determining the specific training needs of technical vs non-technical staff and ensuring frequent re-enforcement
• Measuring the results of the programme and identifying avenues to further boost employee engagement and programme effectiveness

Joana Abreu joined the Cyber Security Department at E-REDES in February 2020, where she is currently responsible for managing GRC activities, the certified ISMS of the organization and the cybersecurity awareness and training program. Joana has a master’s degree in Mathematics and Applications from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). She started her professional career in 2009 as a Teaching Assistant at IST and, afterwards, as a Statistical and Market Research Analyst at Banco BPI. In 2014, she joined OMIClear, the Clearing House of the Iberian Energy Market, where she became the Security Manager and, later, also responsible for Business Continuity, managing both the ISMS and the BCMS of the company.

• Leveraging an advanced multi-layered defence-in-depth social engineering approach for IT and OT converged environments
• Predicting future social engineering vulnerabilities resulting from WHF, BYOD, cloud migration, and supply chain expansion, and optimising your human firewall against these
• Developing a first-class incident response strategy to effectively capture, store, share and report critical incident data, in order to speed up the attribution process and strengthen your human firewall

Jelle Wieringa has over 20 years of experience in business development, sales, management, and marketing. He is best known as a public speaker and industry commentator, able to speak on cybersecurity topics in a way that speaks to both technical and non-technical audiences alike. His focus is on building a bridge between IT and the business. In his current role as Security Advocate for EMEA for KnowBe4, he helps organizations of all sizes understand why more emphasis is needed on the human factor, and how to manage the ongoing problem of social engineering. His goal is to help organizations and users increase their resilience by making smarter security decisions.

Welcome to Combatting Social Engineering

Webinar Programme