Social Engineering Blogs

Happy New Year Everybody. Sorry I have been slack with blog posts this year, family and work are keeping me busy at the moment.

So less about the excuses and more about the doing When I speak to people about Social Engineering there are many common themes, most common being how to handle failure and how to go about being the person / group you are impersonating. The other one is how you make that initial introduction, and start getting your manipulation fu on. Its a good question, and one I used to struggle with when I first got started.

I would say its pretty common to be nervous when approaching someone, especially when you have some form of manipulation planned. I don’t want to offend anyone, but this is what dating is initially right? You want that person of interest to be spell bound by you, so how do you make that first step without totally destroying any chance of success? Well my clue is in the aspect of dating.

When I was researching Hypnosis, NLP and the wonderful world of Mentalism I came across the work of PUA (Pick Up Artist) Ross Jeffries. Now I am no huge fan, and I think some of this stuff from the PUA community is border line on the ethical and moral front for me, but I am sure it works and gets the results if thats your thing. Anyway, one of the things they talk about is how to introduce yourself to that person of interest. This technique applies for the dating game, if your looking to try out some magic and mentalism, as well as engaging in some social engineering. Obviously its important to have context, and timing and the place is crucial, but the approach is to Compliment, Introduce, Question (CIQ).

A simple example could be as follows: You look like a helpful set of guys, my name is Dale and I started here today. I left my badge inside, would you help me get back in please?

Its simple, concise and does the job. It is also useful to use language that implies compliance. Phrases that include, could you, would you, can you etc have a form that implies of course we all know you can meet our request, but its not very often you get a smart Alec that doesn’t want to comply.

Short but sweet post, but something for you to try out in any situation where you need to introduce yourself, remember never miss an opportunity to use the power of persuasion.