What Would MacGyver Do?
“The great thing about a map: it gets you in and out of places in a lot different ways.” – MacGyver When I was young I was a big fan of the American TV show, MacGyver. Every week I tuned in to see how MacGyver would build some truly incredible things with very basic and unexpected materials — even if some of his solutions were hard to believe. For example, in one episode MacGyver built a futuristic motorized heat-seeking gun using only a set of batteries, an electric mixer,…
Automating Social Engineering: Part Three
PHASE 2: Ruses Once we have enough information about the employees and company in question, we can begin to make some sense of the information and start crafting our ruses. It is worth noting that this stage currently does not have a lot of since it does require a lot of human intuition and information processing. Certainly as we continue developing the tool we will be able to automate more and create some decision making systems capable of creating useful ruses, but for now a key factor of…
Automating Social Engineering: Part Two
As with any other type of penetration test, we need to gather information. The only difference here is that instead of looking for operating system types, software versions, and vulnerabilities, we’re searching for information about the company, their employees, their social networking presence, et cetera. Given that we’re performing an assessment from a corporate perspective, there are some limitations with regard to privacy and employees’ private life, but the truth is that real attackers won’t abide by such limitations. So, you should assume that any…
Automating Social Engineering: Part One
since the original conceptualization of computer security, and perhaps even before, social engineering has been in existence. One could say that social engineering began when societies began, whether it was realized or not. It is now time to give some of this work to scripts and applications to make it a little more interesting… As the years passed in the computer security community, network penetration became more and more necessary, but computers were not the only thing getting compromised. Social engineering was part of the hacker subculture, but it was…