This is the age-old practice of conning naturally trusting people into doing something under false pretences. The extraordinarily effective techniques can be played out in person or online. Here are some confident examples.
Individuals or company employees may be targeted with a call from someone pretending to be a fresh-faced co-worker, an irate boss, a record-keeping human resources manager, or a concerned IT administrator, for example. The engineer may plead for, else demand, sensitive information such as a name, contact, a username, or a password. They may be phoning from, say, your workplace reception area or could be using a spoof caller ID service to give them internal credibility while actually calling from an outside line.
The walk-in alternative of, or extension to, the phone call scam, sees a social engineer pose in one of many possible roles to gain entrance to a building, to gain people's confidence, and ultimately to steal something sensitive such as network credentials.
Here moving into a technical vein, an attractive link, perhaps added to a site without the owner's knowledge, grabs your attention so you click it. Bam! You've been subjected to a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack. The retrieved site is malicious but it's unlikely you'd suspect that. You could be lured to download malware if you'd not already done so when resolving the page, else to provide some sensitive data. This is a commonplace scenario.
These prolific e-mail scams, again, often try to tempt you to some site where you're liberally scalped. Alternatively you could receive a spoof e-mail that is apparently from a known contact who has kindly sent you a file. Duly executed, the Trojan rootkit now provides the hacker a controlling backdoor access to your PC and its network.
Here's the growth market. Splashing around your sensitive data, trusting any old social application, and friending strangers on traceable online profiles is begging for trouble.
Engineering social networks is like shooting fish in a barrel, but there's also low hanging fruit to be had in forums, on personal or business sites, on blogs and wikis, and in newsgroups where, for instance, your new IT recruit may be asking what's the problem with that vulnerable old version of something like, well, WordPress for example.
Social engineering is invariably tough to tackle, but what we can do is to create general awareness and set down a policy of what team members can and cannot divulge to anyone without a proven identity. That policy should extend to the use of network kit, of any type, that leaves the office and, sadly, may have to extend to internet use as well.
Note
Again, refer to Appendix C's Security Policy as a help in setting up security rules.
Bear in mind that the guy who's copying that joke to your thumbdrive could be uploading a worm as well, the girl who's borrowing your wireless may be infiltrating the network, or the colleague who's fawning over your new phone could be tapping your data. You have to be ultra-careful who you trust and, for those working for you, you should give them the excuse to blame their refusal on strictly enforced default-deny guidelines.
Note
Technically risky
Let's advance to this book's core task, assessing and protecting those technical risks to your site and, by relation, to network assets also affecting its security.
We'll slice and dice the broad scope of the subject by starting locally with the PC and winding up in the guts of the site and server. First we'll assess the broad risk and, throughout the ensuing chapters, reflect that with our end-to-end solutions.