Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Obama and Hypnosis

I was on the Altered Egos radio program from Nanaimo, BC this morning, and we were talking about hypnosis, NLP and influence as it relates to political speech, advertising, etc.

I mentioned an awesome paper about Obama’s use of hypnotic language and patterning – the paper can be found here. In most of its moral conclusions, the paper is far right and ridiculous (e.g. “Obama’s actions are far more than simply lying”).

However, in its analysis of Obama’s use of language, the paper is worth a read. It’s an excellent description of many hypnotic language patterns and how they can be used artfully to influence a large audience.

Technorati Tags: altered egos, Hypnosis, influence, NLP, obama


Modern Social Engineering

I’ve spent a lot of my time lately working on projects related to social engineering. Writing articles, prepping class material, and just generally having conversations and brushing up on my skills. For those that don’t already know, Chris Nickerson and I are doing a full five-day class on Social Engineering at ChicagoCon in May, and there’s much to prep for.

In preparation, and to give people a brief taste, Chris and I did a webinar last week. Check out the video for the webinar over at EH.net

Also, since Chris leaked it already (when someone SE’d him on EH.net), I’ll post a small snippet of one afternoon of course outline here:

Determining Tests
• Types of testing
o Direction of attacks
o External
? Electronic
• Phishing
• Client-side / browser side exploitation
• Metasploit
• Core
• By hand

• Malicious attachments
? Person to Person
• Phone
• Written
• Social Networks/IM
• Public Manipulation
o Internal
? Person to Person
• Gaining access to physical credentials
• Solicitation
• Direct interaction
• Creating spies / information leak sources
o Methods (al mamalik,qulaam, kgb,cia,others)
o Trading information
• Becoming an employee
? Electronic
• CD/Key drops
• Authentication bypass
• Key /perimeter bypass
• Falsification of credentials
• RFID/ HID copying

Check out the webinar, and hopefully you sign up for the class.

Technorati Tags: chicagocon, Chris Nickerson, influence, SE Master Class, Security, social engineering