Cybercriminals use sophisticated techniques like social engineering or phishing to deceive vulnerable people. In the disguise of a reputed person or official entity, fraudsters contact unsuspecting people and ask them to share confidential information or send large volumes of money. The types of impersonation attacks are continuously evolving and cybercriminals take advantage of human psychology and trap unsusceptible people with lower tech knowledge.
- CEO Fraud: Cybercriminals manage to get personally identifiable information about top executives of a company and create a fabricated digital persona to dupe employees. Using the digitally manipulated identity, cyber fraudsters pretend to be the CEO of the targeted company via email asking emails to share confidential information about the company or transfer a significant amount of energy. Often they attend official meetings without being caught.
- Social Media Impersonation: This cyber attack mostly takes at social media platforms where cyber fraudsters in the disguise of influential people or known celebrities spread false information, promote fake advertisements, or harm the societal image of the victims. Often social media impersonation is to gain trust and trick innocent people into sending their private information.
- Email Impersonation: Although every type of online impersonation poses serious consequences, email impersonation emerges as the most common and devastating cyber attack. Fabricated emails are sent to targeted people, these emails often contain malicious links or attachments rerouting viewers to malicious websites.
It is said that only 51% of people validate the credibility of the source asking for sensitive information or sending money, indicating the alarming ease with which cyber fraudsters execute their nefarious schemes. Considering the evolving types and devastating consequences, it’s highly critical to develop online impersonation prevention to effectively mitigate the rising risks.
Cybersecurity Protocols for Online Impersonation Prevention
To stay ahead of cybercriminals’ nefarious schemes and protect digital personas, a multi-faceted approach must be implemented. There are two perspectives to this approach: either stay conscious or protect digital identities. Both individuals and businesses must play their part in the fight against impersonation attacks.
1. Robust Biometric Authentication
Using biometrics such as fingerprints or faces to secure digital accounts can play a helpful role in preventing cybercriminals from accessing your information. Biometrics are difficult to spoof or replicate, adding an extra layer of security against impersonation and unauthorized access. Integrating liveness detection into biometric authentication technology and implementing robust security measures to protect biometric data against data breaches can go a long way, ensuring impersonation attack prevention.
2. Email Security Measures
To accurately authenticate emails and validate the credibility of the email, use sophisticated technologies like DMARC ‘domain-based message reporting, and conformance’ or DKIM ‘domain keys identified mail’. These technologies are employed to authenticate emails, warding off scammers and cyber fraudsters. These email authentication methods minutely analyze the received emails and detect forged emails like phishing emails, helping you to identify fraudulent emails. Detecting fraudulent or malicious emails enables individuals or organizations to stay alert and prevent impersonation attacks in real time.
3. Multi-Factor Authentication
Securing your digital presence is crucial to online impersonation attack prevention. Impersonation attacks happen when cybercriminals get unauthorized access to your confidential information. Employing multi-factor authentication will significantly prevent cyber fraudsters from getting their hands on your confidential information. Adding additional verification factors like OTPs, fingerprints or facial recognition will substantially increase the security of digital presence. If a cybercriminal manages to compromise your fingerprint or passwords, he won’t be able to bypass facial recognition, restricting unauthorized access to your private information.
4. Secure Access Controls
By ensuring that only genuine individuals have access to services or systems and spoofed attempts are restricted from entering the privileges, the potential risks of online impersonation attacks can be mitigated. Furthermore, regularly reviewing and updating access control could play a significant role in preventing cybercriminal’s illegitimate access to the systems.
5. Network Security
Cybercriminals exploit every opportunity for self-serving interests and nefarious activities. They even take advantage of weak connections and networks, intruding into communications and accessing confidential information. To ensure effective impersonation prevention, it’s pivotal to manage and monitor network traffic and develop robust protective measures to ensure network security. By implementing firewalls and secure network construction, the integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted data can be validated.
Final Thoughts
The distressing rate at which impersonation attacks are evolving and affecting thousands of people globally, it’s the need of the hour to develop effective online impersonation attack prevention measures. However, impersonation requires a multi-faceted approach involving the integration of robust technologies, continuous vigilance, and stringent policies.
