Social Engineering

social Enginee Social Engineering is a fascinating, but somewhat primitive, way of gathering information. It is amazing people can be tricked so readily into a scam. The best equipment and security measures mean nothing if passwords and email addresses can be obtained through social engineering. It would be like a small child being given the keys to Fort Knox and told not to tell anyone they have them. The kid down the street comes over with some candy and toys and the rest would be history. It can also be used by a company as a defense against being hacked by hacking a hacker using his ego or wants against him. It usually will cater to a person’s needs and interests, finding a way to lure them and eventually gaining access to a computer. It could be in the form a winning a prize and needing to give certain information. It could be in the form of and email attachment that when opened could install a shell giving access to information. These scammers will impersonate many different people stating they were hired to fix a problem. They might even call on the phone and inform the person to go through complicated screens, knowing they are likely to become intimidated. They now have a frustrated worker who thinks something is wrong with their machine and could more easily get a password or other information.

Ethics have to be considered when we talk about social engineering, as well as greed. If information is worth five million dollars and someone will hand it over for ten thousand it makes it extremely hard to keep a secret. People are also much more accustomed to ripping people and companies off with what seem like old tactics. Social engineering has been around in different forms for a very long time and will probably stay around as long as people have emotional, financial or physical needs to be toyed with. I would say it is difficult leading to almost impossible to not take some loss from these kinds of attacks against security. “Wherever you leak the...