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Your Service Desk is the New Attack Vector—Here's How to Defend It.. The service desk is the new perimeter Attackers aren’t picking locks—they’re picking people. The fastest way inside many enterprises is still the service desk. Threat actors like Scattered Spider have turned social engineering into a science, and your help desk agents are their primary target. One convincing phone call can turn a routine password reset into full domain access. The MGM Resorts and Clorox incidents showed how devastating one successful social-engineering call can be, with a nine-figure business impact and weeks of disruption. That’s not a fluke; it’s the playbook. Training Helps, Controls Decide Yes, agent training matters. No, it won’t save you on its own. Social engineers are specialists at exploiting helpful humans under time pressure. Scripts, “common sense,” and ad-hoc challenge questions break down when an attacker is calm, prepared, and persuasive. If your last line of defense is an overworked agent making a judgment call, you’ve already lost. Bottom line: user verification must be a security-owned workflow, not an agent-owned conversation. Lock Down the Help Desk with a NIST-Aligned Workflow See how to design role-based, points-based verification that fits your ServiceNow flow and stops social engineering without slowing support. Download our comprehensive guide and start building a more resilient help desk today A workflow approach to help desk user verification Shift verification out of the agent’s head and into a formal IT-security workflow that’s consistent, logged, and enforced: What “good” looks like (NIST-aligned profiles) Most of our customers start with three verification profiles mapped to user risk and available factors. It could be like this: Tip: If MFA isn’t universally available, prefer enterprise-verified data (HRIS/IDP attributes, device posture, geo/behavior signals) over guessable personal trivia. Keep a short, vetted list and retire any question that leaks or shows up in breaches. Detect attacks early, document everything When verification lives inside the workflow, you get security outcomes “for free”. These are some of the extra benefits realized by our customers: Rollout plan that won’t break the desk All organizations have their own project principles but these are common traits: A note on our tools FastPass Identity Verification Manager (IVM) implements this model: mandatory, role-based, and points-based verification, tightly integrated with ITSM. It centralizes checks, enforces policy, and returns results + context to the ticket for alerting, audit, and compliance. If you’re facing Scattered Spider-style tactics, this is the kind of guardrail that blocks them at the first hop. FastPassCorp has assisted several large organizations with implementation of secure user workflow, and has gained a superior experience in the field documented in the available guides and videos. The takeaway You don’t beat social engineering with nicer posters and longer scripts. You beat it by removing discretion, raising proof, and instrumenting the workflow the attacker is trying to exploit. Do that, and the service desk stops being a soft target and starts acting like a proper control. Concerned about Scattered Spider? If you’d like to know how you can protect your service desk and agents against a Scattered Spider or other social engineering attack? Have a look at our videos and guides for implementing a secure user verification workflow or contact us for a meeting on your situation. Sponsored and written by FastPassCorp.