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Service desks are under attack: What can you do about it?. Service desk agents are here to help, and we all prefer to talk to an understanding person than a chatbot when wrestling with an IT problem. Unfortunately, it’s this human element that cybercriminals also seek to exploit when targeting service desks. They’ll use social engineering to sweet-talk your service desk agents into divulging credentials, resetting passwords, or approving back-door access. We’ll walk through how they do it and advise how to reinforce this weak link in the security chain – without losing the human touch. Recent attacks on service desks Service desk security has been in the news thanks to several large British retailers being recently struck by DragonForce ransomware. Initial access in these cases was gained through social engineering at the service desk – allegedly by the US & UK based cybercrime group, Scattered Spider. Secure your Active Directory passwords with Specops Password Policy Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report found stolen credentials are involved in 44.7% of breaches.    Effortlessly secure Active Directory with compliant password policies, blocking 4+ billion compromised passwords, boosting security, and slashing support hassles! Why do hackers target service desks? To put it simply, it’s quicker and easier to manipulate a person than to carry out a more technical intrusion. Service desk teams are trained to solve problems quickly and get people working again. Attackers will masquerade as panicked executives or trusted vendors, then try to exploit social norms like helpfulness, deference to authority, and aversion to conflict. They’ll weaponize empathy, urgency, and trust to trick staff into rushing or circumventing process. Once they’ve gained that initial foothold, they can advance to privilege escalation or deploying ransomware. How do social engineering attacks play out? Enforce verification or invite breaches Training and phishing simulations can help the team stay sharp and spot procedural drift. You can also enforce least privilege by locking down what agents can do by default (e.g. require manager sign-off for high-risk actions, segment ticket systems from core identity stores, and log every step). But to support you agents in every interaction, giving them the tools to enforce verification is the best bet. Without a rigorous identity check, your service desk becomes a route for attackers to exploit human trust. Mandating verification introduces an important layer of friction that thwarts even the most convincing pretexts. Specops Secure Service Desk integrates multi-factor verification, real-time risk scoring, and customizable challenge flows – so your team can enforce identity with confidence and block social engineering at the door. By embedding these checks into every password reset, privilege escalation, or remote-session request, you dramatically shrink the human-attack surface. Want to see how Secure Service Desk could fit in with your environment? Book a live demo. Sponsored and written by Specops Software.