BSidesPGH – Never Surrender: Reducing Social Engineering Risk

The weakest link in the security chain is often between the keyboard and the chair. People are a problem. We have a natural instinct as humans to trust someone’s word. Although various technical means have been developed to cope with security threats, human factors have been comparatively neglected.

Once you put a human in a security chain, you have a weakness. That problem should be addressed by security practitioners, not every member of an organization. Very few would disagree that social engineering is the the most common and least challenging way to compromise an organization, but most accept the notion that there isn’t much they can do about it. False!

This talk will focus on the psychological, technical, and physical involvement of social engineering, and also look at how we can remove the human element of the human problem. We will explore what organizations are doing wrong, also the processes and technical controls that can be put in place to achieve a strong social engineering defense.

We’ll template a solution that can be customized. What will really help? What is the truth? What if we don’t want to surrender our organization to social engineers?

Transcript