Social Engineering - Skill of Chance

{LANG_NAVORIGIN} Exploits Social Engineering
By: ScotCop, 07/16/2004

What is Social Engineering?

Social Engineering is the art of having people do what you want, or give you info on passwords and almost anything, with out them knowing they're doing so. Social Engineering applies to every aspect of the internet and also to the real world.

This can start with a simple chat in a chat room or a phone call to a business that someone wants to maybe gain access too from the internet without having to hack in. In a business situation of social engineering the hacker will have done a lot of research on the business, he will most likely know every department that the business has. He could then try to phone up a department and say he was a member of the IT department and that the passwords are being changed for routine security reasons then he would tell the user to change his/her password to what ever he wants.He could then simply logon to their system using the new password and he’s in.

One of the main words that is going to come up in this document is "building trust", as in my view in Social Engineering this is most important. If you build up some trust with a user or befriend them you’re going to find it easier to manipulate them to do what you want.

Social Engineering is a skill, and like any skill you have to practice to get it perfect. In some cases the Hacker has been building trust with the users he wants info from for weeks even months, sometimes you can have a target do what you want while looking genuinely like a friend in a space of a hour, it all depends on the targets awareness.

Social Engineering and Trojans

You want to infect a user with a Trojan, but you can’t just come out with click this link and download "that" and run it, you've got to build up some trust between you and the target. Ok let's say we're on IRC, we join #help, we want to pick a target that looks like they don’t have knowledge (I don’t want to use the word lamer).

Where better than help we see a user asking for help on setting up a channel we query them and say, "hi how are you doing? Do you need help setting up a channel?" they reply, "ok" we tell the user how to set up a channel, we join that channel, now we're going to find out what that user is interested in. We start talking Blah we ask if he plays any games online (nice he’s in to Battlefield 1942). Ok what we're going to do now is tell him about a new mod for that game we’ve got to hype this mod up make it sound great. If he’s interested were going to talk more to him, if not then you can give up, or you could keep trying to build trust over a couple of days and at the next chance you get try again with some thing else. But lucky for us he is interested he asks for a link, ok we're going to send him the Trojan so we need to say we’ve forgotten the link, try to make this look good by saying wait I'll check my history, give it a couple of minutes then go back to him and tell him you can't find it, but we're willing too send the file to him. This is where the trust we’ve built with him comes in to play (but you’ve still got to watch your self because he might be uncomfortable about doing this). Ok he agrees, we send him the Trojan (this is where all your hard work can become a waste of time in seconds, meaning that his Virus checker is up to date and has scanned the file and has showed up as a Trojan get ready to leave the channel fast). Ok his virus checker, if he’s got one has not showed it up as a Trojan he’s run it, now he wants to know why when he runs the mod it didn’t work. (This is the bit that breaks you or makes you) Once he’s ran the program it is stupid just to leave the channel or quit because he might be suspicious, so we’ve got to keep talking to him even if we just want to run straight on to his system tell him it might have got corrupted on your hard disk you’ll try to search your history again to see if you can find it. Ok we cant, we’re now going to try and change the subject, take his mind off it. Change the subject, say to hardware, wow were off talking about his new XP 2600 AMD CPU.

Its best to wait about twenty minutes after he’s ran the Trojan so he’s forgotten all about it hopefully. The only problem with doing this is it can backfire on you cause he might have been using Social Engineering on you once he ran the program and he’s keeping you talking so he’s got time to update his virus checker and remove the Trojan before you access his system. It’s a game of chance.

Demand Characteristics

This is basically when a user might not agree with what you are saying but he decides not to express his own views, mostly because he does not want to offend other users or maybe not wanting to look like "fool" in front of a big crowd, or he does not want to offend well know users so he decides too agree and keep quite, using situations like this to your advantage, you maybe able to guide a targets behavior.

Too Succeed

You need to make what your saying to a target believable.
Make the target think they are in control, Guide the target.
Never openly fight the target, not even if your not getting any where with him there might be other chances later on if you fight with the target you will likely blow them.
Try to use things the target is interested as, we found out the user was interested in Battlefield so we took advantage of that and used that against him.
Build trust with a target.

Social Engineering Passwords

Here are a few well known tips on getting users to reveal their passwords while using a seemly innocent chat with a target, keeping in mind that people don’t find it easy to remember complex passwords.

Step One - Find out if the target has kids as some people use there kids names
Step Two - Has target got Pets? If so what’s there names?
Step Three - Targets Date of Birth
Step Four - Targets wife’s name or husbands name

If none of these work, not all is lost you still have build trust up with the target you may be able to get back at a later date and get more useful information out of them.

Note: Most people use one password for more than one thing

Social Engineering Last words

I hope after reading this document you can see just how effective Social Engineering can be, my advise to you is read all the documents you can find on it and practice it.

Tutorial Written by ScotCop

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