The manner in which many social engineers currently approach social engineering perpetuates a poor mentality. The focus recently among many subsets of the community is that social engineering is just telling a good lie or making a good counterfeit. The reason this is bad is because it relies on the victim consciously and critically interpreting external stimuli. The goal needs to be to cause an internal reaction in line with the nature of the target. Don’t tell someone to jump in the river, take them to the river then set them on fire.
During this talk we will cover issues with how social engineers are practicing their craft, as well as steps and methods to rectify the identified deficiencies.
Noah Beddome is a penetration tester and lead social engineer for Coalfire Labs, at Coalfire Systems. As a former Marine, and current InfoSec professional Noah has a passion for “breaking the systems” in order to make it better.