Now Available:

line

Featured Resources:

line

Newsletter

Email Address:


line

Ask the Expert

Have a question for our resident expert? Email your questions to Rebecca.

« Social Engineering, Ethics, and Why You Should Never Put Anything Online That You Don't Want Others To See | Main | Missouri Dept of Revenue Sued (Under DPPA) For Releasing PII That Was Posted for Sale on the Internet »

Social Engineering Suckers Security Sages


Yesterday at Black Hat a couple of the presenters, Shawn Moyer and Nathan Hamiel, reportedly discussed their experiment that revealed how easily they got some prominent Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to fall for a social engineering scam played out using social networking sites.

Here's a short excerpt...

"A relatively simple ruse persuaded dozens of prominent security analysts to connect on their social networking Web pages with people who weren't friends at all. They were fake profiles, purportedly of other well-known security pros. The scam was designed to expose the trust that even some of the most skeptical Internet users display on some of the most insecure sites on the Web."

and another...

"Moyer and Hamiel said they did it three times, each time impersonating a different person. Each time they lured in more than 50 new friends within 24 hours. Some of those people were chief security officers for major corporations and defense industry workers, they said."

More reason why everyone, including security pros, need regular training and ongoing awareness communications to help them from becoming sucked into social engineering tricks.

Everyone within a business needs to have social engineering training; all are potential targets.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.realtime-itcompliance.com/type/mt-tb.cgi/782

Post a comment

(All comments are approved by site leader before appearing here. Thanks for commenting!)

line

Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.