Social engineering awareness training focuses on three areas:
Recognizing the different types of social engineering attempts, from phishing to deepfakes, so employees learn the signs of manipulation.
Understanding the psychology of social engineering attacks. Knowing and identifying the emotional levers attackers pull helps disarm them.
Responding effectively by establishing clear protocols for reporting and preventing additional harm.
Some phishing and social engineering training courses divide these up, presenting training separately. Huntress SAT covers all of these different attack types through focused, digestible modules that help employees recognize patterns across social engineering attempts.
Phishing: Using a fake email, text message, or phone call to trick a victim into visiting a website or divulging restricted information, often by posing as a trusted service provider or business partner.
Vishing: “Voice phishing,” typically over an old-school voice-only telephone.
Smishing: “SMS phishing,” involving the use of text messages to personal and/or business cell phones.
Pretexting: More like a traditional “con” game, where a false story or pretext is used to build trust and manipulate a victim.
Tailgating: Physically entering an unauthorized space by “squeezing in” with an authorized person, or digitally using a device that has valid credentials without the authorized user knowing.
Impersonation/deepfakes: Pretending to be someone of authority, sometimes by mimicking their face or voice digitally, and ordering the victim to disclose information or access details to a third party.
Simply explaining how to recognize social engineering attacks robs attackers of much of their effectiveness. Attackers often exploit urgency, authority, and trust. By identifying these tactics in a social engineering course, forewarned is indeed forearmed.
How to stop social engineering usually comes down to a few things: spotting the attempt and knowing what to do next. Teach staff to verify requests and escalate suspicions. They should be trained to:
Verify requests through official channels
Report suspicious activity immediately
Avoid engaging further with the suspected attackers
Another reason to make sure your people receive regular, ongoing social engineering awareness training is the rapid rise of AI-assisted social engineering attempts. Your training should cover AI crafting messages, translations, and mass spearfishing attacks. Fake emails are now better translated. Websites look exactly like the real thing. Deepfake video can be done in real-time. Spear phishing can be highly targeted to individuals or mass-delivered to tens of thousands of users.
All of these examples make social engineering prevention more urgent than ever. Employees should take social engineering prevention training regularly throughout the year to keep up with these threats.
Your social engineering awareness training should feature social engineering attack examples drawn from actual threats targeting organizations right now. Huntress SAT focuses on real-world social engineering attack examples that are the most common and dangerous techniques actively being deployed by threat actors, helping employees recognize and resist the tactics they’re most likely to face.
Huntress SAT delivers social engineering prevention training that stops attacks before they start. Our training goes beyond theory by simulating real-world attacks and explaining the psychological hooks behind them. Our cybersecurity awareness content gets your team ready to identify, resist, and report social engineering attempts, before they even have a chance to succeed. Investing in this kind of social engineering course builds a workforce that’s not only aware of the risks but equipped to stop them.
See how Huntress can help you outsmart social engineering. Book a demo today.
