Black Hat Defense
Vishing Assessment Services
Assess Your Organization's Vulnerability to Phone-Based Social Engineering
Vishing, or Voice Phishing, is a type of social engineering attack where the attacker uses phone calls to gather sensitive information or gain unauthorized access. This technique leverages the personal nature of phone conversations to be even more effective than email-based phishing. Employees who frequently interact with the public, such as customer service representatives and bank tellers, are often more vulnerable to these attacks.
What is Vishing (Pretext Calling)?
Vishing, or pretext calling, involves an attacker pretending to be someone they are not in order to convince the target to share confidential information. Attackers often use details from previous calls to impersonate internal personnel or gain access to restricted company resources. As vishing tactics continue to prove successful, this form of social engineering is being used more frequently.
Unlike phishing emails that cast a wide net, vishing targets specific individuals or departments. The voice-to-voice interaction creates a more immediate, personal connection, making it easier for attackers to manipulate the target in real-time. Positions that regularly handle customer interactions, such as helpdesk agents or support staff, are often prime targets.
Vishing tests can reveal how vulnerable your organization is to these direct attacks. By identifying potential weak points, you can better prepare your employees and reduce the risk posed by vishing attempts.
Are Your Employees at Risk?
Contact us to discover how vishing is impacting your industry. At Black Hat Defense, we conduct thorough and repeatable social engineering assessments customized to your organization's needs. Our tailored approach ensures that we address the unique vulnerabilities of your workforce.
Our Web Pentest Methodology
Black Hat Defense operates under a structured, repeatable methodology. We prioritize this concept in each engagement to make certain that our assessment is reliable, reproducible, and top-notch in quality. As such, our findings can always be verified by your team, before and after the remediation. To get these results, we are guided by the following steps:
01
Define Scope
Before a web application assessment can take place, Black Hat Defense defines a clear scope of the client. Open communication between Black Hat and the client organization is encouraged at this stage to establish a comfortable foundation from which to assess.​
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Determine which of the organization’s applications or domains are to be scanned/tested
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Make exclusions from the assessment known (specific pages/subdomains)
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Decide on the official testing period and confirm time zones.
03
Enumeration
At this stage, we incorporate automated scripts and tools, among other tactics in more advanced information gathering. Our engineers closely examine any possible attack vectors. The gathered information from this stage will be the basis for our exploitation in the next phase.
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Enumerating directories/subdomains
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Checking cloud services for possible misconfigurations
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Correlating known vulnerabilities with the application and relevant services
05
Reporting
Reporting is the final stage of the assessment process. Our analysts aggregate all obtained information and provide the client with a thorough, comprehensive detailing of our findings. The report begins with a high-level breakdown of the overall risk, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses in the application’s protective systems and logic. We also include strategic recommendations to aid business leaders in making informed decisions regarding the application. Further into the report, we break down each vulnerability in technical detail, including our testing process and remediation steps for the IT team, making for a simple remediation process. We go to great lengths to ensure each report is both explicit and easy to navigate.
02
Information Gathering
Black Hat Defense engineers collect as much information as they can on the target, employing a myriad of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools and techniques. The gathered data will help us to understand the operating conditions of the organization, which allows us to assess risk accurately as the engagement progresses. Targeted intelligence might include:
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PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and other files leaked by Google​
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Previous breaches/credential leaks
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Revealing forum posts by application developers
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Exposed robots.txt file
04
Attack and Penetration
With careful consideration, we begin to attack vulnerabilities found within the webapp. This is done cautiously to protect the application and its data, while still verifying the existence of discovered attack vectors. At this stage, we may perform attacks such as:
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SQL injection and/or Cross-Site Scripting
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Employing breached credentials and brute force tools against authorization mechanisms
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Monitoring web app functionality for insecure protocols and functions
06
Remediation Testing
Additionally, upon client request, we may review an assessment after the client organization has patched vulnerabilities. We will ensure changes were implemented properly, and the risk has been eliminated. The previous assessment will be updated to reflect the more secure state of the application.
