What is Tailgating in Cyber Security? – A Silent Gateway for Hackers

27 February 2025

Tailgating is an attempt at unauthorised access to someone's premises without their consent, mainly with the intention of theft or harming the person. However, it's what physical tailgating is.

Tailgating also exists in a nonphysical form, and the victims are mostly organisations. So, if you are a company or an individual who wants to be safe from tailgating, you should know about it, how it works, and how you can prevent it from happening to you or your organisation. That's why we have come up with a detailed blog about tailgating, so let's get straight into it. 

What does Tailgate Mean

Just like physical Tailgating is an unethical way to gain access to a physical place, Tailgating in cyber security is when an intruder gains access to a computer system, network, or application. It can also be called digital tailgating. Organisations are always at high risk of such cyber attack methods, where the intruder mostly intends to espionage the organisation's data.

Let's understand what an attack is with a simple example. Let's say an attacker finds an unattended computer of your employee somewhere, and a session in your organisation's application is active. So, the intruder may try to get the data out of the application or steal important information to Espionage the organisation. That's what a tailgate attempt looks like. There can be many other ways of tailgating, but the main purpose of these attempts is data breach, financial loss, or reputational damage. Implementing IT security policies help prevent physical security breaches like tailgating, ensuring that access controls, authentication measures, and employee awareness training minimise the risks of unauthorised access and potential cyber threats.

How does Tailgating in Cyber Security Work?

The example above may make it look very easy, but there are multiple ways to tailgate someone. Here are a few common methods used for tailgating in cyber security:

Social Engineering Techniques

Social engineering is one of the most common ways for an intruder to gain unauthorised access, mostly by impersonating a trusted person.

• Phishing Emails: Cybercriminals send deceptive emails that trick users into clicking malicious links or providing login credentials.
• Impersonation: Attackers pose as IT staff, employees, or vendors to convince users to share login details or grant system access.
• Fake Support Calls: Fraudsters call employees pretending to be tech support personnel and request remote access to their systems.

Session Hijacking

Session hijacking occurs when an attacker gets access to an active user session. It's a mix of digital tailgating and physical tailgating. The example we talked about above is an example of session hijacking.

Shared or Weak Credential Exploitation

In any organisation, employees don't pay attention to creating strong passwords for the systems or software being used. This is mostly because they think a string password is not needed and will be hard to remember. But such passwords make it easy for the tailgate attendees to guess the password in a few attempts.

Using Public or Unsecured Networks

While companies mostly opt for physical network security for their offices, the same is hard to do for remote employees. Hence, if an employee unknowingly connects to a public or unsecured network, it will become a gateway for the attacker to access the employee's device.

This is especially critical in industries like health care, where sensitive patient data is stored and transmitted online. Implementing strong cybersecurity measures is essential to protect confidential information from potential breaches.

How to Prevent Tailgating in Cyber Security?

Preventing tailgating takes a few things to implement at your organisation's core.

Implement Strong Authentication Measures

You should make crucial changes in your data safety and security policy. This includes forging a multifactor password policy, where employees should use strong passwords with multi factor authentication. Moreover, add a zero-trust policy, which basically means authenticating identities every single time resources are being accessed.

Educate Employees About Cybersecurity Measures

Cybersecurity is very important, and you should invest in educating your employees about it. If you don't, the risk of your employees being pulled into a cyber attack increases. However, if they know about preventive measures, the attack attempt can be ignored easily.

Invest in IT Security and IT Support

Apart from these preventive measures, investing in IT security is also important. These services monitor your IT infrastructure, processes, and networks to ensure nothing suspicious is happening.

Moreover, to deal with phishing attempts and similar unethical practices, you should provide comprehensive IT support for your employees. This way, they can access the support as soon as possible, and a malicious attempt can be acted on early.

Wrapping Up

Tailgating in cyber security is becoming increasingly popular, which is why you can be a potential target. While the above ways to prevent it undoubtedly work, you should add additional layers of security with services like IT security audits and IT support.