[Article]-Column 0: Human Exploitation 101

[don]

I'm very proud to have Mike Murray on board as our newest columnist. You can see his bio and all of his EH-Net articles HERE. Of course there's only one for the moment, but that shall change quickly.

Permanent link: [Article]-Column 0: Human Exploitation 101

So, this is my first column for EthicalHacker.net.  I'm quite excited, as I have spent a whole lot of years exploring penetration testing, vulnerability research and exploit writing, and most of the past couple of years working on exploiting people.

When I use that term, I'm not talking about how to open a third-world sweat shop.  While "human exploitation" tends to fall under the traditional heading of "social engineering," that term has been beaten to death of late. For example, the top five articles in my "social engineering" Google News RSS feed as I write this refer to phishing, social network sites, and three different products claiming to protect against all manner of malware.

Unfortunately, this isn't the type of social engineering I'm going to write about in most of these columns.  And I'm not going to talk about lock-picking, breaking into buildings, or any of the other "No Tech Hacking" type of stuff that Johnny Long and others have made famous over the past couple of years. Nope - this is going to be all about dealing face-to-face (or voice-to-voice or text-to-text) with real live people and exploiting the natural tendency to trust. 

Enjoy and as with everything else on EH-Net, feel free to make comments, suggestions and requests.

Don

[jason]

Interesting column. I look forward to seeing what a 0-day exploit against a person is. BTW, when looking at the column, it's not attributed to Mike (or anyone).

[Kev]

Good write up so far.  As security advances technically, this will be the biggest target in the future.  It is certainly where Mitnick puts a lot of his focus.

[jason]

When's the next one Mike?

[mmurray]

Sorry Jason.. I've been slow on the writing.

I've got a bunch of upcoming articles based on the stuff in the initial one - it's a matter of cleaning it up for EH.net consumption, not just my crazy scribbled notes in margins of book.  (Sometimes, I feel like Fermat.  Though I doubt anybody would spend hundreds of years trying to prove my random ideas).

Look for a new one soon... :-)

[jason]

I'll keep an eye out