The share of social engineering in theft of funds has dropped to a five-year low

The share of social engineering in operations without the client’s consent in the third quarter of this year was at its lowest level since 2019. According to experts, the trend is associated with an increase in the share of other types of attacks, as well as the effectiveness of countermeasures taken.

According to Central Bank statistics, published On November 27, in July-September, the share of social engineering in transactions without the client’s consent (OBS) decreased by approximately 15 percentage points (pp) compared to the second quarter of this year and amounted to 32%. This is a record low since 2019. The volume of stolen funds compared to the second quarter of 2023 decreased slightly (by less than 1%) and amounted to about 3.5 billion rubles.

The observed reduction is a consequence connections a number of large telecom operators and regional operators to the Unified platform for verifying telephone calls “Antifraud,” says Alexander Moiseev, leading information security consultant at Aktiv.Consulting. According to him, in the third quarter relative to the second, the number of cases of fraudulent calls from 8,800 numbers decreased by three quarters, to 714, the number of such calls from “landline numbers” – by two thirds, to 12,233, from mobile phones – by almost half, to 128 .8 million. In addition, according to the expert, on March 1, the Bank of Russia standard came into force, aimed at ensuring the security of financial services using digital device fingerprint technology, which will potentially complement existing anti-fraud solutions in banks. Irina Zinovkina, head of the research group at the Positive Technologies Analytics Department, adds that the decrease in the share of social engineering in OBS is also due to an increase in the share of other attack methods.

• The most noticeable decrease in the share of fraud using social engineering among individuals was shown by OBS with bank cards – minus 16 percentage points), to approximately 29%.
• The volume of stolen funds increased by approximately 12%, to 1.8 billion rubles.
• The number of OBS amounted to more than 248 thousand.
• For comparison: in the SBP, the share of social engineering decreased by only 4 percentage points, to 54%.

In fact, all thefts of funds from individuals occur from cards, so fluctuations in the involvement of attackers in one or another attack scenario lead to changes in the statistics of this category, says Artem Brudanin, head of cybersecurity at RTM Group. Angara SOC response and digital forensics department expert Lada Antipova adds that the focus of social engineering is shifting to the corporate sector.

Meanwhile, a number of experts point to the contradictory nature of the Central Bank’s figures. If you look at the statistics of “Main types of computer attacks” of the same Central Bank report, you can see a positive trend (+76%) in the use of social engineering in relation to the previous four quarters, notes Mr. Brudanin. Probably, such contradictions may be associated with the popularity of hybrid attacks today, the classification of which may be difficult, explains SafeTech CEO Denis Kalemberg.

According to experts, the share of social engineering will resume growth in the near future. Mr. Brudanin believes that this will be connected, in particular, with its use in multi-stage attacks, when several people call the victim in succession.

Yulia Poslavskaya