Serene Logician: April 2011

What is Social Engineering?

There are basically two ways to get confidential information out of someone. The one is to point a gun at them. The other, much more reliable one is to make them believe it's perfectly okay to tell you.

Social Engineering is the latter of these two ways. It's the art of making people freely tell you things they should have kept confidential, or unsuspectingly doing things that will give you access to confidential information, if possible without the person even realizing they just accidentally gave you something valuable.

Good Social Engineering consists of 50% creativity and 50% chutzpah. Unfortunately, as much as I think I have of the former, I'm lacking of the latter. I therefore resort to being paranoid about what people who actually have those skills could do, and writing stories about it.

The purpose of this blog is not to teach you how to be a Social Engineer. It's to teach you how to recognize one when you meet him.

Serene Logician

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

On chains and weakest links

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