Social Engineering, Part XIV

By | October 12, 2008

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Further to my earlier piece about the scamming potential of Web 2.0, here are a couple more examples of why social engineering is a bigger problem than it might appear.

First off, governments and organisations are not as careful with your information as you might expect them to. There are plenty of examples of CD-ROMs and laptops going missing, but often even that doesn’t need to happen. Some governments openly publish such information on the Internet. Indonesia’s minsitry of education, for example, has published the names, addresses, age, date of birth, school and education number of 36 million Indonesian students in easily downloadable XLS format.

Who might use such information? The mind boggles at the possibilities. But one hint might be found in this Straits Times article from neighboring Singapore, which reports a growing wave of faux kidnappings: Gangs phone someone with enough information about their loved one—child, spouse, or whatever—to convince them they’ve been kidnapped and the mark must pay the ransom immediately. In the past six months employees at one bank alone have foiled 14 such attempts—merely by alerting the victims trying to withdraw large amounts of money that they’re being conned.

In the first half of this year, according to the newspaper, 21 people have been scammed out of S$322,000 ($216,000) in this way. Such scams rely on having access to just the kind of information contained in the ministry of education’s database: Knowing kids’ names, their class, their home address, their school chums—all would be invaluable in doing a scam like this. Or any other number of scams.

The point is that we need to think beyond the narrow confines of single channels of data. Scammers don’t: They use a combination of techniques to build up enough information about their mark to be able to either impersonate them or convince them of something. In the above case, it’s that they have kidnapped a relative. In this (still ongoing) Hong Kong-based scam, it’s that they are their bank.

I’m not suggesting Web 2.0 is going to breed a different kind of scam, it’s just going to breed a new kind of opportunity. Social engineering relies on gathering just the sort of data that social networking and presence tools base themselves on.

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