Social Engineering: A Beginners Guide.

[DrLecter]

Social Engineering is described in Wikipedia as:

Quote:Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access and in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim.

That covers it, but here is a Tutorial on how to gain confidence and trust from your victim, it's more of a "What You Can Do" rather than a full tutorial.. It's meant for "Educational" purposes and I don't take the blame (though I will take the credit!) for anything you do with he information.. Don't repeat without my permission yada yada yada; you know the rest.

Social Engineering, I'll refer to it as 'S.E.' for quickness, is extremely useful if you wish to take over a Forum or destroy it without using SQL Injection or other methods of actual Hacking although it can be used for millions of other things as well. S.E. can take as little time, to absolute ages, as to gain trust and not act suspiciously, it takes a lot of time to try and gain trust from people on forums and then you can ask to be a Moderator; but other Administrator's can be thicker than a loaf of mince and just give you Moderator powers even if they don't know you, the more they trust you, the harder you can let them down..

To trick people into actually giving you accounts, act like a nice person and make sure that you talk properly and don't mention hacking.. Unless you occasionally mention how much you hate hackers and that your friend was hacked.. Lying is a vital part of S.E. and even if you aren't the best liar, make sure you have a "story" and a good background. Make sure they can't find any connection to you and hacking whatsoever.

"Hacking" Windows Live Messenger can be done via S.E.. You could pretend to play a "Game" in which you ask them several questions, and one of the questions (phrased unsuspiciously).

One common method I myself have even used is to play two people, perhaps on a forum. Gain trust with one and then claim someone else is planning to hack the forum. Even make a post on this forum or another forum to say you are going to hack it, one of the accounts should then give out the others' email address and then make them force to shut down the site with persuasion; I've done this multiple times..

So S.E. can be used for anything, another target is Help Desks because of what they do; help and they won't be reluctant to tell you everything they have access to.

S.E. can be a Hacker's best tool and should be used to your advantage to get you what you want from where you want it.. it takes time, however so not when you want.

You can apply this to WoW scamming etc, but it's a basic guide you can find pretty much anywhere.

[iterrorist]

pretty good mate +rep , social engineering is great when you have the confidence, not if you dont

[iterrorist]

good mate , nice to see you hanging in there

[Verye]

Sorry, but this guide does not contain much content. It contains a definition of social engineering, which most English-speakers know of, and an obscure example of how to temporarily shut down a small independently run forum.

In fact, the only part of the guide that at all pertains to scamming or even WoW is this quote:

You can apply this to WoW scamming etc

Hardly informative.

I recommend you come up with scenarios and examples of how social engineering could be used in scamming. It is obviously a good scammer's most important and most infamous tool.

[DrLecter]

Sorry, but this guide does not contain much content. It contains a definition of social engineering, which most English-speakers know of, and an obscure example of how to temporarily shut down a small independently run forum.

In fact, the only part of the guide that at all pertains to scamming or even WoW is this quote:



Hardly informative.

I recommend you come up with scenarios and examples of how social engineering could be used in scamming. It is obviously a good scammer's most important and most infamous tool.

Hence the "A beginners guide". Some people just don't know where to start with social engineering and applying it to scamming. So that was a basic definition and a little guide. Some pople know more, some know nothing, some need guidance. You should check my other thread.

But I don't apply social engineering to wow scams, it takes too much time, but if you were to, you should gain the trust of the guild leader so you can access the eqdkp database and forum database, get all the passwords, usernames emails, possible first and last names, d.o.b etc.

Thank you for the criticism though, rather than being like [some] others and saying "lolz tis is no goed."