Simon William L. - The art of deception: controlling the human element of security

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Copyright 2002 by Kevin D. Mitnick. All rights reserved.

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 0-471-23712-4

For Reba Vartanian, Shelly Jaffe, Chickie Leventhal, and Mitchell Mitnick, and for the late Alan Mitnick, Adam Mitnick, and Jack Biello

For Arynne, Victoria, and David, Sheldon, Vincent, and Elena

Social Engineering

Social engineering uses influence and persuasion to deceive people by convincing them that the social engineer is someone he is not, or by manipulation. As a result, the social engineer is able to take advantage of people to obtain information with or without the use of technology.

Foreword

We humans are born with an inner drive to explore the nature of our surroundings. As young men, both Kevin Mitnick and I were intensely curious about the world and eager to prove ourselves. We were rewarded often in our attempts to learn new things, solve puzzles, and win at games. But at the same time, the world around us taught us rules of behavior that constrained our inner urge toward free exploration. For our boldest scientists and technological entrepreneurs, as well as for people like Kevin Mitnick, following this inner urge offers the greatest thrills, letting us accomplish things that others believe cannot be done.

Kevin Mitnick is one of the finest people I know. Ask him, and he will say forthrightly that what he used to dosocial engineeringinvolves conning people. But Kevin is no longer a social engineer. And even when he was, his motive never was to enrich himself or damage others. That's not to say that there aren't dangerous and destructive criminals out there who use social engineering to cause real harm. In fact, that's exactly why Kevin wrote this bookto warn you about them.

The Art of Deception shows how vulnerable we all aregovernment, business, and each of us personallyto the intrusions of the social engineer. In this security-conscious era, we spend huge sums on technology to protect our computer networks and data. This book points out how easy it is to trick insiders and circumvent all this technological protection.

Whether you work in business or government, this book provides a powerful road map to help you understand how social engineers work and what you can do to foil them. Using fictionalized stories that are both entertaining and eye-opening, Kevin and coauthor Bill Simon bring to life the techniques of the social engineering underworld. After each story, they offer practical guidelines to help you guard against the breaches and threats they've described.

Technological security leaves major gaps that people like Kevin can help us close. Read this book and you may finally realize that we all need to turn to the Mitnick's among us for guidance.

Steve Wozniak

Preface

Some hackers destroy people's files or entire hard drives; they're called crackers or vandals . Some novice hackers don't bother learning the technology, but simply download hacker tools to break into computer systems; they're called script kiddies. More experienced hackers with programming skills develop hacker programs and post them to the Web and to bulletin board systems. And then there are individuals who have no interest in the technology, but use the computer merely as a tool to aid them in stealing money, goods, or services.

Despite the media-created myth of Kevin Mitnick, I am not a malicious hacker.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

STARTING OUT

My path was probably set early in life. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, but bored. After my father split when I was three, my mother worked as a waitress to support us. To see me thenan only child being raised by a mother who put in long, harried days on a sometimes-erratic schedule would have been to see a youngster on his own almost all his waking hours. I was my own babysitter.

Growing up in a San Fernando Valley community gave me the whole of Los Angeles to explore, and by the age of twelve I had discovered a way to travel free throughout the whole greater L.A. area. I realized one day while riding the bus that the security of the bus transfer I had purchased relied on the unusual pattern of the paper-punch that the drivers used to mark day, time, and route on the transfer slips. A friendly driver, answering my carefully planted question, told me where to buy that special type of punch.

The transfers are meant to let you change buses and continue a journey to your destination, but I worked out how to use them to travel anywhere I wanted to go for free. Obtaining blank transfers was a walk in the park.

The trash bins at the bus terminals were always filled with only-partly-used books of transfers that the drivers tossed away at the end of their shifts. With a pad of blanks and the punch, I could mark my own transfers and travel anywhere that L.A. buses went. Before long, I had all but memorized the bus schedules of the entire system. (This was an early example of my surprising memory for certain types of information; I can still, today, remember phone numbers, passwords, and other seemingly trivial details as far back as my childhood.)