Tranceboy – The Psychology of Social Engineering

Basically, social engineering is the art and science of getting people to comply to your wishes. It is not a way of mind control, it will not allow you to get people to perform tasks wildly outside of their normal behaviour and it is far from foolproof.

It also involves far more than simply quick thinking and a variety of amusing accents. Social engineering can involve a lot of ‘groundwork’, information gathering and idle chit chat before an attempt at gaining information is ever made. Like hacking, most of the work is in the preparation, rather than the attempt itself.

You may think this talk may seem to be a weak excuse to demonstrate how these techniques can be used for hacking. OK, fair enough. However, the only way to defend against this sort of security attack is to know what methods may be used. With this knowledge it is possible to pick-up on these techniques being used against either you or your company and prevent security breaches before anyone gets near your data. A CERT style security alert with few details is pointless in this case. It would simply boil down to “Some people may try to get access to your system by pretending some things are true. Don’t let them.” As usual, no help what-so-ever.

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