Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Subliminal Hacking at Hash Days 2011 … Swiss Security Conference

Hashdays – the premier technical security conference in the center of Switzerland organized by DEFCON Switzerland.

During 4 days the center of Switzerland will become also the center of IT security knowledge transfer. On October 26th and 27h you will be able to learn a lot in the workshops. The following 2 days (October 28th and 29th) will be full of highly technical IT security talks.

Be sure to reserve your seat early – the space is limited.

I have the pleasure of once again speaking at the awesome Hash Days Security Conference held in Lucerne Switzerland. The conference had its first outing last year and it really was a brilliant event, with great talks, workshops and attendees, it really was a good time, I even went to jail there :)

So this years talk is called “Social Engineering Like In The Movies – The Reality of Awareness and Manipulation”. On the TV and on the Big Screen we see all sorts of strange and amazing things, and when it comes to reading peoples minds, telling if they are telling a lie, or influencing someone to carry out our desires even the far out can seem possible. With the growing exposure of body language, micro expressions, and lingustic techniques sometimes we forget about actual reality. In this talk I will talk about what you can really gain when you understand body language tells, can the eyes really reveal hidden messages, and can we really get people to hand over their possesions with the right language and framing.

Social Engineering Like In The Movies – The reality of awareness and manipulation
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Marathon Memory

What significant event happened on October 17th 1989?

Well, If you’re a San Franciscan you might say a 7.1 earthquake in the Oakland-S.F. area, which is the correct answer.

What if someone asked you what happened in your life on August 12th 1978?  Could you remember?

Now take that a step further, what if it was something as simple as you bought a new pair of shoes that you wore 2 months later to a friend’s birthday party.

This may sound extreme but believe it or not some people including actress Marilu Henner can actually remember every day of their life.  60 minutes has reported that new research is tackling the idea that human “superior autobiographical subjects” have the capability to remember every event in their life starting from an early age.

Dr. James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California Irvine, and a renowned expert on memory, is the first to discover and study Hyperthymesia.  He says that this type of memory is new to science.  McGaugh and his research team have had to devise their own tests, like the one on public events.

They are also using MRI scans of the subjects to see if they can find obvious differences in the structure of the brains of “superior autobiographical subjects” and normal subjects.  The evidence is pointing to the fact that McGaugh’s subjects have a larger temporal lobe.  The temporal lobe is the part of the brain neurobiologists think has to do with storing new memories.

The researchers are also pursuing other avenues for answers to this fascinating ability such as DNA testing (genetic differences) and handedness testing, since all three men in the subject pool are left handed.

When researcher and neuroscientist Dr. Larry Cahill was asked what percentage of the time his five (six, at the time of this article,  including Henner) “superior autobiographical subject” were correct he said, “I would say over 99% of the time, if not 100 percent of the time, if they tell you something and you can check it, they’re right.  I’ve almost given up looking now, because ok, they’re right,” he replied.

Cahill goes on to state that he does not see these subjects as savants or autistic variants, he purports, “They’re not people who have an extraordinary ability, but can’t tie their shoe… [there is] this remarkable ability in a person who is otherwise pretty darn normal.”

The study’s applications of such abilities are quite extraordinary.  Perhaps, this type of research could benefit Alzheimer patients as well as other memory disorders.

Emotional Honeybees?

Insects might have feelings according to an article in Wired Science.    Honeybees especially are now being looked as pessimists.

The ability to display and recognize emotions is a cognitive trait that has been limited, until now, to higher animals such as dogs, horses and humans.

Newcastle researchers, Melissa Bateson and Jeri Wright wrote in their study that the findings “suggest that honeybees could be regarded as exhibiting emotions.”

Their experiments were designed to show whether animals are, like humans, capable of experiencing cognitive states in which ambiguous information is interpreted negatively.

“Invertebrates like bees aren’t typically thought of as having human-like emotions,” said Bateson,  “Way, way back, we share a common ancestor. The basic physiology of the brain has been retained over evolutionary time. There are basic similarities [between honeybees and vertebrate neurological traits].”

The study has some interesting findings and Bateson goes on to note, “It would be interesting to know if pesticides were altering their cognition, creating states similar to depression.”