I encourage you to explicitly forbid social engineering attacks inyour pentest scopes. Instead, try simulating the kinds of compromisesthat social engineering attacks lead to, with an emphasis on detectionand response. This provides much more satisfying and useful outcomes,without the risks that allowing social engineering introduces.
Should Social Engineering be a part of Penetration Testing
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NOTICE: The information in this article is for penetration testers to use during a professional pen testing audit ONLY and not for illegal purposes. Each reader will need to be aware of their locations and legal boundaries in regards to the tactics mentioned within.
Companies with authentication processes, firewalls, VPNs, and network monitoring software are still wide open to an attack if an employee unwittingly gives away key information. Social engineering is the human side of testing for corporate network vulnerabilities. Penetration testers employ multiple tactics to test their targets. By means of phishing, vishing, and impersonation a pen tester will mimic attacks that a malicious social engineer would use to attempt a system breach. Depending on the scope of work, penetration testers may also seek employment at the target company. The sole objective while employed for the target company is to maintain their pretext and elicit information.
Successful training incorporates a variety of activities that teach how to identify social engineering attempts. Share stories, act out scenarios, hold drills, run tabletop exercises, and use relevant video clips and training materials.
Give employees direct instructions that apply to your specific workplace. For example, tell employees to send suspicious and potential phishing emails to suspicious@yourcompany.com, or alert a manager if they feel they're encountering or have encountered a social engineering situation.
The whole situation continued to bother me, so I thought this might be a good time for a reminder about the purpose of phishing and other social engineering tests, as well as suggestions for what should and should not be included in your social engineering prevention training.
Social engineering is psychological manipulation of human emotions to gain access to information or a particular outcome. It works because it takes advantage of the belief that most humans naturally trust and/or want to help fellow human beings. Phishing is one of the most common types of social engineering, but vishing (phone phishing) and smishing (text phishing) are also rising. We have a three-part series on phishing you can read for more information. In this blog, we will focus on the social engineering prevention tools and tactics you can use to train and test your team.
Our social engineer testing consultants know that the best way to get through a secured door that requires a badge or fob to access is to approach that door behind someone who has a badge with your hands full. If you appear to be juggling your lunch, coffee, and a box of files while trying to reach for your badge, most of the time, the person ahead of you will hold the door for you. This technique is called tailgating. One of our consultants carried the same salad and coffee cup, along with a briefcase around for an entire day and successfully tailgated each door he attempted. (I heard he later ate the salad for supper!)
In nowadays dumpster diving can be a part of physical penetration test.The information that the penetration tester should collect will help him to construct his attack scenario.In this article we will examine what a penetration tester should look for when he is performing a dumpster diving for his engagement.
These kind of papers can help penetration testers to create forgeries of the documents.This is essential for any social engineering engagement as you can cheat the employees to perform the action that you want.
The term social engineering, also known as "human hacking" or "social hacking," originally had a horizon of meaning in the context of political science before its now rather negative connotation in the context of information security.
Karl Popper first introduced the term in 1945 in his work The Open Society and its Enemies. In his work, Popper criticized the general view that one can imagine an ideal society and then put this ideal into practice. In contrast, he advocated the form of social engineering, which, through the creation of appropriate institutions, penetrates only limited subsections of society in order to solve specific problems there. His principle was based on the idea that a human being can be improved in a similar way to a machine. And so the term experienced increasing popularity in the early 1970s as an expression of optimism. At the time, this hope was based on the belief that social society could be positively reshaped through targeted rational and engineering interventions. Contrary to Popper's attitude, manipulative methods to achieve this goal were generally not rejected.
A historical analysis of social engineering shows that it is highly correlated with the technical possibilities of the respective epoch. If social engineering is not limited to today's context, in the sense of targeted information technology data theft, it quickly becomes clear that the methods of malicious manipulation, persuasion and rabble-rousing are as old as mankind itself. Already in ancient works, such as Socrates' defense speech in 399 B.C. (Apology), which Plato's teacher delivered before the Athenian People's Court, the sole purpose was to convince his listeners with rhetorical artistry and to achieve the anticipated goal. In Socrates' case, this sophistry was intended to prevent his own guilty verdict and thus save him from the death penalty. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that all wanting and doing was of no avail and Socrates was executed a short time later.
Back to social engineering in the modern sociotechnical security context. One of the early forms was phreaking, which was practiced in the 1980s in particular. Phreaking refers to a subculture of hackers at the time who were concerned with the security mechanisms of telephony, in particular with the manipulation of telephone connections. The aim of phreaking is to hack telephone systems using special signal tones, for their free use. This methodology dates back to the late 19th century, but only really became problematic with the expansion of mobile telephony. As technology advanced, this approach was not limited to telephone connections, but also included communication security techniques for electronic espionage. Van Eck phreaking now makes it possible for fraudsters to receive unintentional electromagnetic emissions caused by computer screens, among other things.
At the latest, people such as Kevin Mitnick, Thomas Ryan or the fraud artist Frank Abagnale helped the genre of skilled manipulators to gain a broader social reputation. On the one hand, this can be explained by the fact that these seemingly morally purified individuals underwent a social metamorphosis from "gangster" to respected "white hat hacker," and some of them are still sitting in government circles or important positions today as established experts. On the other hand, the media image of this group of people changed enormously after they were favorably portrayed in films such as Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can" and thus became a significant part of pop culture.
In social engineering, the perpetrator, in the form of the hacker, exploits human characteristics such as helpfulness, trust, and respect or fear of authority to skillfully manipulate his victims. In this way, the cyber criminals entice their victims to bypass security functions, disclose confidential information, make bank transfers, or install malware on their private or corporate end devices. This form of interpersonal manipulation is, as already mentioned, as old as time immemorial. However, in the age of ever-advancing digital communication, new opportunities arise for fraudsters. The effect of technological progress now offers them millions of potential victims, whom they can deceive extremely effectively and lucratively.
At the turn of the year 2020, information security expert Linus Neumann impressively addressed the current challenges, dangers, but also opportunities of social engineering in his talk "Brains Hacking" at Europe's largest hacker conference, the 36th Chaos Communication Congress - C3 for short. In it, he painfully demonstrated that not only do state-of-the-art attack mechanisms play a role, but that it is precisely tried-and-tested methods such as macro viruses that are still very effective. These have existed since 1999 and have since been frequent components of an attack in the context of phishing and malicious office attachments to e-mails, for example when transporting ransomware or crypto Trojans. At that time, the genus macro virus came to sad fame due to a variant called "Melissa". Melissa is the fastest and most widespread computer virus of all time. It is a fake Word file disguised as a supposed invoice, which overloaded numerous IT systems at the time.
In summary, the central feature of social engineering is often the deception of a victim, by concealing or falsifying the perpetrator's own identity. This is done with the intention of the fraudster, in the guise of a technician, craftsman or support employee, to persuade companies or Internet service providers to hand over valuable information or to entice them to click on infected links, which then install malware. Particularly perfidious in this context is, for example, the scam of a program that is promoted on the Internet as anti-virus software and is supposed to help clean the hard drive, but then turns out to be malware when installed.
From the perspective of a white-hat hacker in penetration testing, social engineering can be seen as a possible testing area along with three other approaches. These include technical security, physical security and the often underestimated organizational security. A penetration test represents an attempt to assess the security of an IT infrastructure by deliberately and safely exploiting security vulnerabilities. These risky vulnerabilities can exist in operating systems, services and application flaws, incorrect configurations, and risky end-user behavior. These penetration tests are meaningful and useful for monitoring the effectiveness of applied protection mechanisms as well as end-user compliance with security policies. 2ff7e9595c
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