Social Hacking

  So in the first lesson I tried to establish that trust is one of the, if not the most important thing when it comes to hacking someone. In this lesson I will discuss some more ways of gaining someones trust.
  The first way is to pretend that you are someone else. This is a well known strategy from social engineering. I realized that I am going to use a lot of examples, so I'll just make the examples a little more fictional and less “wordy”. Example: Alex works as an accountant at MedCorpes. You need Alex's local system password. Easiest way to do this is to call up Alex and say that you are the network administrator and that you need her password. This will probably work in 9 times out of 10. However, there are more interesting ways.
  Another way to gain trust or at least make someone listen to you is to pick up on small details. If you have watched the show Psyched you'll know exactly what I mean. For you who don't; the show is about a detective who pretends to be a psychic and he uses his ability to solve different cases. However, he is not really psychic, he just has a really good memory and pays attention to details. Then he uses the knowledge gained to “act” like he has psychic abilities. This does actually work in real life too. Maybe not as good as in the show but good enough to be considered. One example for my life (I heard you moan..) was when I was traveling by bus somewhere, I can't recall the exact destination, however it was a long trip. I was sitting next to a girl who had brought a magazine from home. She was subscribing to the magazine so her address was on the back side. Discretely I read the address at the beginning of the trip. We later started to talk and I had some fun with the information I had obtained. She was pretty impressed when I “guessed” her last name and then mentioned the street she lived on when she told me what city she lived in. This is also a good exercise when you are traveling somewhere. Look at the people around you, what information can you obtain without even talking to them? Doing this will both exercise your memory and social skills.
  One big source of information are cell phone conversation. Most often people don't think about what they are saying when talking on cell phones publicly. Even if you don't plan to talk to the person, listen to what they say and think of how you could use the information obtained. I know a lot of you who are reading this will think that I am really creepy at this point, spying and trying to get information about strangers. Well as I see it, I do it because I can and it teaches me how others think and act. This is an important realization to do when trying to understand someone: everyone has different thoughts and different views on the world. Understanding how someone else thinks is a really hard task. I know that there are some people that I will never be able to understand how they think.
  The last recourse of information about others is to look at the appearance of a person. To get accurate information this way is close to impossible and not something I would recommend. I would even say that you should try to not even involve the way people look when trying to figure them out. It is a animal instinct to judge people from the way the look, we need to know if we should run, fight or make friends. I have change my appearance a few times in my life and even though I am the same person, with the same line of though, people did treat me differently. Try to ignore the way a person look and try to see how they act instead. A confident and happy person is probably easier to talk to then a person who looks sad and insecure.

  As a last note this time I want to add that I do care about others privacy. However, I think that listening in on a cell phone conversation on the subway is acceptable. However, going through someones mail or personal belongings without permission is wrong. There is a clear line and I hope you are able to see it. It does seem like I am talking about objects when I am writing this, however, other people are humans too. They have their own set of feeling and that what makes social hacking so interesting.