Social engineering penetration testing imitates the approach and techniques intruders use to trick employees into divulging sensitive information or enabling security system breaches. It helps evaluate your employees’ security awareness and adherence to security practices, including under the pressure of intimidation or urgency. Social engineering testing can come as a part of comprehensive penetration testing or as a separate service.

Social Engineering Attacks ScienceSoft Simulates

Phishing

Malicious emails sent to multiple employees.

Spear phishing

Emails sent to a specific employee(s) responsible for high-level decisions.

Whaling

Email attacks targeting the C-suite.

Vishing

Manipulative phone calls.

Smishing

Manipulative mobile text messages.

ScienceSoft’s Penetration Testing Consultant, CEH Uladzislau Murashka shares his experience:

"To test user behavior in case of phishing attacks (the most frequent type), we use:

Emails with malicious URLs, to check if the user clicked them.
Emails with fake invitations and forms, including login forms, to check if the user filled them.
Emails with executable files, to check if the user downloaded and/or installed them."

Social Engineering Tactics We Apply

Imitating cybercriminals, ScienceSoft uses persuasion techniques to make social engineering engagements plausible.

Authority

Posing as an authoritative person (e.g., a police official or the company's CEO) to pressure your employees into fulfilling the required action.

Intimidation

Threatening with severe consequences if certain actions are not performed.

Social proof

Implying that a required action is what many people do.

Scarcity

Making a time- or quantity-limited offer to cause subconscious desire to accept it.

Urgency

Calling to immediate action to make your employees act without thinking.

Familiarity

Impersonating people your employees like or have met before.

How We Test

Below we describe typical steps ScienceSoft takes during social engineering testing projects:

Planning

Depending on the customer’s testing needs, we define:

The type(s) of social engineering attacks.
Target employees to test.
The timing of the attack.

Reconnaissance

In case of black box social engineering pentesting, we collect information about the company, its employees and business partners the same way the real attackers would do: from open sources (business registers, listings, social media, press releases, newsletters, etc.).

In case ScienceSoft and the client agree on the white box approach, we request the necessary information from the company’s representatives.

Attack preparation

We create a story behind the attack and prepare the texts for malicious emails, manipulative SMS or phone calls.

Attack simulation

ScienceSoft’s ethical hackers run one or several social engineering attacks on the target employees.

Reporting

We analyze the testing findings and provide a final report containing:

An overview of employees’ security knowledge gaps, risky behavior.
Information disclosed by the employees.
Identified vulnerabilities, e.g., email filtering inefficiency.
Potential threats of exploiting the security gaps by cybercriminals.
Remediation recommendations.

Additionally, we can perform the remediation activities to help reduce the risk in case of real social engineering attacks:

Preparing and/or conducting cybersecurity training for employees with a focus on vulnerabilities revealed during the testing.
Installing and configuring security components: firewalls, email security and antivirus software, a data loss prevention system, etc.

Our Customers Say

Ross Shamelashvili

Manager, Development Operations

We had used ScienceSoft as our PenTest company. Experience that we had was very good. ScienceSoft had accomplished pentest in a very professional manner and on time. Personally I had only positive impressions from working with the team. Scout is looking forward to work with ScienceSoft in the future.

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Daniel Diaz

BS, Documentation and Compliance Specialist

ScienceSoft provided us with the proper documentation agreed upon during the initial stages. They had quick turnaround times for pentesting, less than 2 weeks! ScienceSoft Sales team works with you until all services are complete. I highly recommend ScienceSoft.

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Why Choose ScienceSoft as Your Social Engineering Company

19 years in cybersecurity.
200+ IT security assessment and consulting projects for healthcare, finance, manufacturing, telecom and other industries.
Certified Ethical Hackers on board.
Recognized as Top Penetration Testing Company by Clutch.
Efficient quality management and customers’ data security confirmed by ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certificates.
ScienceSoft USA Corporation is listed among The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2022 by Financial Time.

Preventing Social Engineering: Challenges We Handle

Challenge #1

It is difficult to create lifelike test conditions to see how employees would respond to malicious psychological manipulation.

Solution

Solution

We ensure that employees are unaware of testing and can follow all the steps of real-world attackers:

Gathering information about the company and target employees from open sources.
Creating a story for the attack, which is easy to buy into.
Sending real emails and SMS, making real phone calls.

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Challenge #2

It is difficult to build strong email security to recognize and resist phishing emails.

Solution

Solution

ScienceSoft helps reinforce email security by implementing and configuring:

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) to specify the servers and domains authorized to send emails on behalf of the company.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) to protect the domain from being used in business email compromise attacks.
DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools to block the transmission of sensitive data.
Email server anti-malware protection, such as attachment scanning and/or sandboxing.

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Social Engineering Testing: Success Stories by ScienceSoft

Pentesting and Social Engineering Testing for Reconice to Improve ePHI Security

As part of IT infrastructure pentesting for a speech recognition software provider, ScienceSoft imitated a phishing attack against the Customer’s staff to check their ability to recognize and withstand social engineering techniques.

Project details

Vulnerability Assessment, Pentesting, and Social Engineering Testing for a Retail Bank

As a result of mock phishing attacks, ScienceSoft’s ethical hackers convinced 65% of targeted employees to send personal data via email. ScienceSoft recommended that the Customer hold security training sessions for employees.

Project details

Code Review, Pentesting and Social Engineering Testing for an Award-Winning IT Company

To find maximum security gaps endangering the Customer's cloud application, ScienceSoft combined source code review and penetration testing with social engineering testing.

Project details

Network Pentesting and Social Engineering Testing for a Mobile Operator

During a pentesting project, ScienceSoft simulated phishing attacks to check if potential intruders can use social engineering to break into the Customer's network.

Project details