Cupfighter.net

Logo 2.0 Part I

Sharon works as a social engineer in London for First Defence. As social engineer she breaks into buildings, lies to people and pretends to be other people. It was a trade that she started young and later found out that she could earn a living and she has been doing it for over ten years. Social networks has influenced social engineering and made it a lot easier.

Social engineering is used for both good and bad, even tough the bad use gets a lot more attention then the good uses. All advertising is a form of social engineering.

If hackers are using social engineering they are effectively hacking the human firewall in stead of the technical firewall.

Why does it work?

• People have a tendency to trust
• People want to help
• People respect authorities
• It is easier to give people information then to get rid of them
• People don’t like confrontations
• Social engineers invoke emotion

Why do Social Engineering and Social Networking combine so “well”? Social engineering exploits trust, and social networks are built on trust. Read more…

A the DefCon social engineering contest, contestants are given a list of information they have to obtain and a target company that they have to obtain it from, along with a list of phone numbers of people to get it from. They are given a limited amount of time to get as much of the information as they can.

I walked into the social engineering contest just as the second contestant was ready to start his assignment. His target was a major US automotive company. During his session he was able to speak to two people.

It is very good to hear that at least the first guy they got on the line was actually not comfortable to answer the questions ask them by the contestant.

The second victim was a person that only worked with the company (a major automobile manufacturer) for 2 months as a security engineer. He was eased into answering mundain but valuable questions like his work and break times, but also about food service at the company etc.

Read more…