Social Engineering
Cool article about Social Engineering
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When writing about social engineering it’s probably appropriate to start with a quote from the most famous of social engineers; “Hackers are going to go after the weakest link in the security chain, which is always the people. You can have the best security in the world, but if I can convince one person in the company to give me sensitive information, your security budget has been wasted.” - Kevin Mitnick (2007).
Social engineering is the named coined to the approach of manipulating a social situation in order to gain information on a specific target which is done on a covert level (i.e. the target does not know the real reasons for the request of the information). This information is then used to gain further sensitive information.
The main aim of most social engineers is to gain unauthorised access to a system in order to obtain information; this is either for personal or financial gain. The social engineer himself (they are more often than not male) will be either working as an individual or in a small group and as mention above will be doing so for either personal gain (status within his peer group) or financial gain. The latter reason of financial gain is becoming a more frequent occurrence as data becomes more of a commodity in modern businesses. The reasons for attacks are numerous but a large proportion can be acclaimed to industrial espionage incited by a rival company.
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