Social Engineering Attacks and Counter Intelligence

1. Describe what social engineering and counterintelligence are and their potential implications to our national security in regard to the leaked Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs.

Social Engineering and counterintelligence are two very serious topics. Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. This is a type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or gaining computer system access. Social engineering is a kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction to make people break security procedures. Counterintelligence refers to efforts made by intelligence organizations to prevent hostile or enemy intelligence organizations from successfully gathering and collecting intelligence against them. The conclusions I gather from our national security with regard to the articles introduced is that someone in the government or of a high ranking that had access to this information had a successful social engineering attack carried out on them, in the Wiki releases article. There is no way anyone can get his or her hands on 400,000 classified files. If a social engineering attack wasn’t the case, then it may have been a case of guilt and the files were leaked purposely. I think that it’s the same case when it comes to the Iraq war logs. Then you get to the topic of counterintelligence, counterintelligence is supposed to prevent situations of the sort. So for those files to be leaked, someone dropped the ball in the counterintelligence department.

2. Examine the importance of forming a sound information security workforce and describe the challenges faced by organizations in doing this as evidenced by the two articles.

Organizations have to understand the importance of forming a sound information security workforce. Information is the lifeblood of organizations, a vital business asset in today’s IT-enabled world. IT systems and networks link every internal...