Your IT Help Desk is protected, but what about your employees?

Bob pauses. He’s wary of unsolicited calls and has had the company security awareness training; however, he has been receiving a lot of spam email today, and this IT agent knows his manager’s name and has a local accent … so he takes the call.

Unfortunately, Bob is not talking to IT; he’s been called by Scattered Spider. They’ve been targeting him with spam emails all morning, and they have used LinkedIn to figure out who his line manager is. They’re native English speakers, so don’t arouse suspicion. They are now, with his assistance, about to take control of his machine and plant ransomware, which will disrupt operations and cost the company a huge amount. But what could Bob have done?

While companies are giving their IT Help Desk agents tools such as Trusona’s ATO Protect to robustly challenge inbound callers and determine their identity and location, employees remain unprotected from social engineering scams. Until now.

Trusona’s Agent Verify (patent pending) service gives employees a foolproof way to determine if it is an IT agent on the other end of the call. They simply ask the agent to give them a unique 6-digit agent code, and they then navigate to a dedicated verification page on the company intranet where the code is entered, and the agent is verified – the agent’s name and email can be displayed along with the code validity.

The Agent Verify code only works once for a limited time, and re-entering it will give an error. Codes are generated by the agent via Trusona’s ATO Protect Suite, and agents are trained to only generate and issue codes when they call employees, so they can’t be socially engineered by inbound callers who are trying to impersonate them in a Man-In-The-Middle attack.

The service is quick and easy to use, and with minimal integration, quickly extends social engineering protection to the entire workforce.

If Bob’s company had Agent Verify, then the conversation would have gone:

“Sure, if you can give me your Agent Verify code, then we’re good to go.”

<click>

“Hello, you still there?”