Cybercrime is a growth industry like no other. According to statistics from the FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report, complaints to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) have been rising since 2017. In 2021 alone, IC3 received 847,376 complaints which amounted to $6.9 billion in reported losses, up from 2020’s 791,790 complaints and $4.2 billion in reported losses.
A major focus of cybersecurity as an industry is its efforts to detect, root out, and respond to potential fraudsters attempting to trick companies and people out of their money, data, or both. To this end, some impressive technology has been created to combat the technological side of the issue, to keep hackers and similar bad actors from accessing data and account privileges they shouldn’t.
This made a lot of sense, especially in the earlier days of the Internet where cybersecurity measures were nowhere near as robust as they are today. However, the technological side of cybersecurity is no longer the weakest link in a company’s proverbial chain. Often, a scammer will simply target the people in a company and fool them into giving up their personal details, account passwords, and other sensitive information and gain access that way.
As a matter of fact, the most-reported crime in the 2021 Internet Crime Report report was phishing, a social engineering scam wherein the victim receives a deceptive message from someone in an attempt to get the victim to reveal personal information or account credentials…
