Cis 502 Week 4 Case Study 2

Week 4 Case Study 2

Social Engineering Attacks and Counterintelligence

CIS 502 Theories of Security Management

Social engineering attacks and counterintelligence have major impacts to our national security. In July 2010, the Afghan War Diary was released in WikiLeaks. In October 2010, WikiLeaks also released the largest military leak in history, the Iraq War Logs, revealing the war occupation in Iraq. This type of information is considered as classified data by the Department of Defense.

What is social engineering?

Social engineering is essentially the art of gaining access to buildings, systems or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques. For example, instead of trying to find software vulnerability, a social engineer might call an employee and pose as an IT support person, trying to trick the employee into divulging his password.

What is Counterintelligence?

Counterintelligence is targeting our nation’s most valuable secrets. As the lead agency for exposing, preventing, and investigating intelligence activities on U.S. soil, the FBI works to keep weapons of mass destruction and other embargoed technologies from falling into wrong hands, to protect critical national secrets and assets, and to strengthen the global threat picture by proactively gathering information and intelligence.

Social engineering and counterintelligence and their potential implications are a general threat as it leaks information most valuable to our nation. Wiki leaks founder, Julian Assanges activist website WikiLeaks and several media partners have published a collection of nearly 400,000 secret U.S. military documents from the Iraq War, providing new details of well-known issues, including civilian casualties, detainee abuse and meddling by Iran.

The data the researchers collected and used was appropriated by WikiLeaks, which the Pentagon has tried to suppress. The Pentagon has also...