How Not To Get Scammed

Many skills employed by petty thieves, street scammers and pickpockets are similar to those used by social engineers. For example, they are masters of manipulation, using social pressure, distraction and psychology to dupe people into parting with their money or other belongings.

BBC recently wrote tips on how not to get scammed. The experts cited throughout the article come from the excellent TV series The Real Hustle. This show is mandatory viewing for those interested in how scams are conducted, and certainly demonstrates a lot of overlap with the Social Engineering world.  There's an American version of the show now, but stick to the British one - it is much better, and doesn't come across as a re-enactment.

An Interesting Lie Detection Method

Forget expensive fMRI-based lie detection or iffy polygraph tests, give your suspect a pencil and paper and get them to draw what happened - a new study suggests their artistic efforts will betray whether they are telling the truth or not.

If it can be stolen, someone already has their eye on it

When companies think about theft, they often omit items they feel would not be of interest to outsiders. Because of this, they often leave things in accessible areas, expecting that they will not be stolen or tampered with.

A group of junior highschool students recently planted 12 apple trees. Within a few days, 3 of the $100 trees were uprooted and stolen. We can only hope the perpetrators are caught and dealt with appropriately.

While a typical school does not have the resources to protect their student's outdoor projects, corporations should be automatically building mitigating costs into their projects right from the start.

Moral of the story? There is a thief for everything that is left unattended.

Will your company win the competition? I hope not!

Social engineering has evidently earned a new level of respect from hacker community: For the first time, this year's Defcon gathering in Las Vegas will feature a contest in which participants will compete to gather nuggets of information from unsuspecting target companies -- over the telephone instead of the Internet.

Do virtual thieves haul their loot in virtual trucks?

A virtual thieving spree could have real life consequences for culprits in Finland, where police are investigating the theft of virtual furniture on a social networking site popular with teenagers.

"Significant amounts of virtual property" were stolen  from around 400 users of the Habbo Hotel virtual hotel, where visitors can create a character for themselves to hang out with friends, take care of virtual pets and furnish their own rooms for a fee, Finnish police said Tuesday.

Can humans be infected by computer viruses?

British scientist Dr. Mark Gasson from the University of Reading inserted a contaminated version of an ID computer chip, normally used to track pets, into his hand to help prove that the chip was able to pass computer viruses on to other external control systems.

Dr. Gasson's chip allows him to pass through security doors and activate his cell phone. It uses ambient electromagnetic energy to transmit data. Through a series of tests, Dr. Gasson was able to show that the chip affects all surrounding computerized systems and if any other implanted chips connect to the system, they too would be damaged by the contaminated chip.