Abraxas’ chief scientist Lance Cottrell recently shared with TheNewNewInternet how he sees social engineering as one of the biggest cyber threats today:
“We are seeing a lot of issues with highly targeted, highly crafted phishing attacks,” he said.”If you know you are only going after one person, you can do enough research to almost guarantee that they will open your attachment even if they are a smart, careful, paranoid person. It’s ‘Dear bank member, you need to update your password at such and such website,’ or ‘Hey Fred, I saw you at this conference last week. You asked about our new product literature when you came by our booth – Here it is.’ And if he actually was at that place, it is the kind of thing he would be looking at and it’s appropriate to him. You can get extremely highly likelihoods of people actually making use of this.”