Social Engineering: Intro to Social Engineering for Complete Newbie

SE. What the heck is SE. SE is social engineering.

Any person has a personality and each personality type has different types of flaws. While we all have strengths, we all also have weaknesses. Being aware of social engineering and of your own flaws is essential to surviving. Whether you are in a workplace, jail, the street or in government, you will face manipulative people who will try exploit your weaknesses. Social engineering is a way to trick people into doing something or giving out information that they not normally would have done ordinarily.

Let's look at the prime example of social engineering: The NSA. They do extensive personality tests on their potential employees to find weaknesses in their personality type which they then try to use to exploit the employee to work for the NSA for as long as possible. The funny thing is that the NSA is losing employees at an alarming rate, since they don't offer very competitive salaries when compared for example to the private sector. The funny thing is that if the weakness in your personality is the love of money, well then the NSA will have a hard time keeping you.

Something that I find very interesting is that it is actually very easy to exploit a certain type of personality that has a reasonably high IQ. So for example people are narcissist often have very high IQ's and they are aware of this. They often like it if people tell them they are intelligent, and their emotional IQ will lower when they are complimented on their high level of intelligence, which means they won't notice when people are just trying to play in on their insecurities by telling them how intelligent they are.

So what can you do to not fall victim to social engineering? Well it helps to stay informed and talk to people in the area where you stay. Try and learn to think the way that the social engineer does. Remember that people who are in very dangerous environments such as jail are often very very paranoid, but they have good reason to be. Sometimes being very paranoid can help you a bit, but don't let the paranoia stop you from living your life. Become more street smart. Talk and make friends with people who are street smart(you know who they are, you might not be friends with them, but you will know somebody like this), if you spend time to listen to them they will tell you all kinds of stories that will make your brain a bit more suspicious of people and a bit more situationally aware. There are many book on social engineering that you can read, three that I've read that I would highly recommend are:(don't laugh at these title I am 100% serious about them):

• Don't Shoot The Dog - Karen Pryor: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/1860542387
• How to Make Friends and Influence People - Dale Canegie: https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034

There is also a really good subreddit on this topic which you can find here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialEngineering/

Here are some videos that I would also highly reccomend:

Please comment if you have some cool ideas to share. Picture from:
http://www.redblue.team/2017/02/abusing-google-app-scripting-through.html