Social Engineering Skill Set: #3

Research.  This is tedious at times, yet tremendously important.  Methods of research will vary, but  the accuracy and amount of information you gather can directly increase your credibility.

1. Seeking information from all available resources, both in the wild (information that is public) and otherwise (I’ll leave the interpretation up to you), and following all leads to and from each source – be thorough.  Learn to use** search engines, social networking sites, SET, etc.   Digging through trash, well, that’s up to you.
2. Recording the data, not just remembering.
3. Organizing the raw data into coherent information.
4. This is also a good time for character study:  learn the lingo and mannerisms, if needed.
5. All this should lead you to the easiest way to achieve your goal.

Innocuous information is seldom so.  You never know when throwing out the name of someone’s dog will be the key that opens the lock.

 BTW, don’t break the law.  That’s bad – just saying.

**There is a distinct difference between ‘use’ and ‘participate’ and I mean use.

Social Engineering Skill Set: #2

Reading people and people reading you.  Well, people reading what you want them to read anyway.    We don’t just hear other people, we combine what we see with what we hear with what we have experienced before with what we are wired to comprehend to complete our understanding.  Observing body language, facial expressions, gestures, and more to understand more accurately what another person is feeling and thinking.   Reading people is a skill that some of us weren’t born with, myself included.  Luckily, whether or not you were inherently gifted, there are many books on the subject.  However, remember that this goes both ways;  you want to send the correct messages with your words, but if all of your signs don’t fit what you are saying, you’ll never be convincing.  This topic is widely varied from whole body language to facial expressions to voice intonations, so I will leave you with a list of authors and let the experts do their thing.

(You will notice that some of these authors are writing to educate others on what a social engineer might try to do.  This is not an oversight.  You can take the information on what has been effective from these books as they give very precise details on how many controlling techniques are used.  It will also give you the techniques that many people will use to counteract your intentions.)

1. Joe Navarro
2. Paul Ekman
3. David J. Lieberman
4. Barbara Pease
5. Pamela Meyer
6. Christine Cruz
7. Robert Greene
8. Robert B. Cialdini
9. Martha Stout
10.  Albert J. Bernstein
11. Connie Dieken
12. Gavin de Becker
13. George Thompson
14. Mark Bowden
15. Gerard I. Nierenberg
16. Kevin Hogan
17. Sally Hogshead
18. Nicholas Boothman

Social Engineering Skill Set: #1

Detachment.  It requires the discipline to control your emotions to such a degree that they are not physically or mentally filtering a situation except in that a way you intend.  That is what allows you to see a larger and more accurate picture than others which can create a strategic advantage. Simply repressing emotion is only one part of the skill.  Being able to elicit an emotion within yourself that might be quite contrary to your real emotion (and making it convincing) is very difficult.    For most people, emotions are like a stream that simply just flows and they go where is carries them. They don’t really think about it much and therein is the key.  The social engineer learns to install dams, flood gates and aqua ducts in their own stream so that they can control their emotions as required to alter the path of others’ streams to serve the end goal.

The obvious example that most engineers think of is managing the fear of getting caught, but a more common problem is managing the emotion that comes right before the seizing of the prize when your success is seemingly imminent.  This kind of emotional leakage triggers warning lights in others, even though it is not a negative emotion that is leaking.

What to do with Bad Reviews

Client X had a negative review on a fairly prominent directory.  It had been there for years.  When Client X started paying attention to his business presence on the internet, he discovered this and of course came to me to fix it. Fix it?

Mistake One:  people often misunderstand the permanency of the internet.

It’s not like I can go to that server, log into the database, and erase that review.  I wish I could, there’s money in that somewhere.  But then people would be planting dazzling reviews for themselves, scathing ones for their competition, and then the system is even more messed up.  Even if I could request a review to be deleted, what would the criteria be for approval or denial?  The end result is still a corrupted system. So the current fix for this is the ability to respond to the negative review.  Well, sometimes you get to, if the site offers that functionality.

The same thing goes for tweets and forum posts.  So many times people have posted something that has come back to bite them.  So think about what you are posting – it will need to stand the test of time.

Lesson One:  You can consider the information on the internet as, for all practical purposes, permanent.

The first thing I do is see if the site has a way to respond to reviews.  A response has to be crafted very carefully with the right trigger words.  If you are too soft or too cold in your response, you could cause more damage to your reputation.  This is where language becomes very important, so learn how to use it effectively.

Then I  try and bury the bad review with good ones.  Wait, let me rephrase that.  The first thing I try to do is bury the negative review with legitimate positive reviews.  If you were not as ethical as I, you could choose the first suggestion.  (But beware, sometimes there are countermeasures to thwart this kind of behavior.)  Positive reviews are relatively easy to come by.  The crucial factor here is making sure that the reviews get posted.  This often is determined by the degree to which the reviewer feels comfortable on the internet and/or with computers.  Make sure you get permission to help them with the review before they submit it, so you can replace poor words with strong ones.

The very last thing I would do is try to contact the web administrator and have them remove it. And I probably won’t ever choose this option.