Introduction to the Art of War on Social Engineering

This site is a place wherein I'd like to get some dialog and sharing started of insights and lessons learned on many advanced types of social engineering taking place in the professional world of high technology and science. In many cases social engineering encounters in these areas can become very frightening and some may be humorous (yet still considered serious if gotten out of hand).

I have come to learn over the years that there is a network of social engineers that take great time and care in research (data collection) and actual teaming to profile many individual subjects to work their way into finding the perfect candidate(s) to manipulate and control in performing actions and/or divulging sensitive information (personal, confidential, trade secrets, or even national security secrets) to profit from (there are many scenarios ranging from espionage to human experimentation). Many people in the general work force don't generally know how to recognize the initiation nor tactics these human/social engineers use. A lot of the time social engineers are personable, engaging, gift baring, helpful, always available in order to position themselves close by their primary target candidates (those whom they will profit most from) by using good intelligence collection in order to appeal or trap their primary target.

Wikipedia has a good sight on social engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_%28security%29

Today many using the internet and web based media tools have become very open to the international front using tools, such as these blog spots, MySpace, Facebook, twitter, and many other media tools; leaving themselves a little too open. Readers be aware, the more you communicate about yourself, the more information social engineers can collect on how to appeal to you, capture your attention to them, etc. Many with the agenda to take advantage of your 'trust' (using what ever information they can gather to appeal to your trust).

Advice today: always be alert to how much information you are giving out on your live style habits, your personal desires, your reactions to things, etc. on these open public channels. You may want to review what information you have already given out, to know what some have collected on you already and can be using. There are thousands of social engineers out there gathering the data and profiling (especially if you work in any area that they may profit from).

More tomorrow!