Social Engineering Remains the Coin of the Realm for Ransomware Gangs (or APTs- Advanced Persistent Threats)

We have been on the social engineering (aka Human Risk Management or Human Engineering beat for a while – providing resources to our readership and the OODA Network regularly.  Those resources are compiled here for individuals or organizations who want to follow up on some of the ideas presented in the 60 Minutes segment.  We encourage follow-up and reviewing your threat vectors and vulnerabilities vis a vis the social engineering threat.  There are plenty of pragmatic implementation resources here – especially in the OODAcast conversations with OODA affiliates who are the experts on the social engineering threat), which are a call to action.  

For the uninitiated, the 60 Minutes segment was also a great primer on what the cybersecurity community knows all too well—that good old-fashioned social engineering (a hustle or a con—like some of the stunts Sinatra and the gang pulled in the original Ocean’s 11) remains the main point of entry for most large-scale ransomware hacks. Can someone say the Podesta emails (a fake password change email from the IT department)? Or Stuxnet (which came down to, in the end, someone unwittingly walked into the Iranian nuclear facility with a USB drive with malware on it).