Proactive Defense: Using Deception Against Ransomware Attacks
Fortinet News, April 19th, 2023
Cyber adversaries of all kinds continue to exploit the expanded digital attack surface in unprecedented ways and at scale. In particular, the rapid shift to remote work and sustained work-from-anywhere (WFA) for many organizations has been an ongoing opportunity for cybercriminals to target employees connecting to corporate resources from often poorly secured home networks and devices. These adversaries continue to target and exploit these workers today, years after the shift to WFA started.
The most common ransomware attacks often begin with social engineering. Essentially, properly conducted social engineering strategies, usually in the form of phishing or spear-phishing, can trick users into divulging critical information, from passwords to financial accounts to personally identifiable information (PII). Today, social engineering is being combined with hacking techniques and malware distribution to power increasingly destructive attacks as recent FortiGuard Labs research points out.