Can Your Data Center Shield You from Social Engineering Threats?

How do data centers prevent social engineering attacks from endangering your data? When you purchase a data center’s services, you are trusting them with sensitive data, so it’s natural to be concerned about security. Reliable data centers go to great lengths to prevent social engineering and all other types of cyber attacks.

What do data centers do to shield you from social engineering attacks? How can you help them protect your data?

Social Engineering Threats to Data Centers

How does social engineering impact data centers? Social engineering is impacting every individual and business today. For example, research shows reported phishing attacks rose 61% in 2022.

Hackers often target businesses or vulnerable organizations like government agencies or schools. However, data centers are desirable targets, as well. Data centers tend to have high-quality security but the sheer wealth of data they store can tempt hackers to attempt a breach anyway.

Phishing is one of the main social engineering threats facing data centers today. Spear phishing is also a concern since hackers may do more research if they plan to attack a data center specifically. More sophisticated attacks could even include fake copies of websites data center employees use or attacks on a data center’s clients.

How Data Centers Prevent Social Engineering Attacks

What can your data center do to protect you from social engineering attacks? Data centers take on a serious responsibility when you purchase data storage with them. That responsibility includes security. Most reputable data centers have robust security measures in place, both physically and virtually.

Strong Physical Security

Data centers usually have physical barriers around their servers, both for security and organization. The most reliable data centers enclose servers with materials like expanded metal, which protects servers without restricting airflow, ensuring both performance and security.

Physical security measures like this prevent any unauthorized in-person access to your data. For example, a hacker could attempt to enter a data center while posing as an employee. Server enclosures and on-premises security prevent intruders like this from physically accessing your data.

Network Segmentation

On the virtual end, data centers can employ a variety of defensive strategies. For example, many data centers use network segmentation to restrict movement between servers. Network segmentation splits a local network into many separate, isolated segments, much like islands.

Users can’t freely move between the segments. In the event of a cyber attack, a hacker will only be able to access a small slice of data and nothing else. Network segmentation isn’t limited to data centers, either. Your business can use this strategy to protect data on your end, particularly for IoT devices, routers and sensors.

Access Control and Monitoring

Any reliable data center should have a robust identity and access control strategy in place. This includes strict and sophisticated login protocols for all employee accounts, including those of executives.

Strong identity and access management are vital in order to prevent social engineering attacks. It makes it more difficult for hackers to use stolen credentials and limits what they could potentially do with those credentials.

Advanced, continuous network monitoring is crucial for protecting your data. Most data centers today have automated monitoring capabilities, which constantly analyze network traffic for any suspicious activity. Around-the-clock monitoring ensures that data center personnel spot and stop unauthorized users right away, even if they are using seemingly legitimate credentials.

Social Engineering Training

Finally, in order to prevent social engineering attacks, everyone needs to know how to identify them. Reputable data centers will have training programs in place for employees, teaching them how to recognize the red flags of a social engineering attack. For instance, data center employees should know how to spot a phishing email in their inbox.

This knowledge empowers employees to be the first line of defense for your data. Hackers may try to steal data center employees’ credentials using social engineering tactics. However, good awareness can go a long way toward stopping them.

How Can You Protect Your Data?

Your data center can help keep your data safe, but they can’t do it alone. Remember, you and your employees also have access to the data you are storing on the center’s servers. If a hacker takes advantage of a vulnerability on your team’s end, that is not necessarily the data center’s fault.

Luckily, you can take steps to keep your data safe from end to end. You can employ all of the same tactics data centers use but customized and scaled down for your business’s needs.

Phishing identification training, intelligent spam filtering, network segmentation and sophisticated access control are a great place to start. These security measures can form a strong foundation to help you prevent social engineering attacks, both within your business and at the data center.

How to Prevent Social Engineering Attacks Everywhere

Social engineering attacks are a serious concern today since they are seemingly everywhere. However, awareness is the key to stopping them, no matter where you find them. Hackers are hoping social engineering will trigger a reckless, fear-driven response in their victims.

Simply stepping back, analyzing the content and investigating it can prevent social engineering attacks online, in your email, over text or any other medium. You can keep your data safe by choosing a data center that uses this same awareness-driven strategy.