A little social engineering

Getting children of different sexes and a two-year gap to regularly "play nicely" together appears, at times, to be an impossible feat. But my five-year-old daughter has found a way to get her three-year-old brother to do exactly what she wants.

And she's using social engineering.

If you're not up to date on security issues, social engineering is the term used for manipulating people into giving you the information or access you require, thereby circumventing the normal security measures.

For some people, this ability to talk someone into doing something they don't want to do, or shouldn't do, comes naturally. My daughter, for instance, has my son regularly playing Barbies with her, thanks to a simple line: "Look Devon, it's Mrs Thomas The Tank Engine!"

While an outsider can see what is happening, the person being engineered often has no idea he (or she) is being played. It's a case of human nature; we are expected to be nice, polite and helpful to our customers and our colleagues, and this becomes an integral part of our nature. Add a little charm, and many people will bend over backwards to provide "help" to a stranger.

This is the reason why a company's employee base is often its biggest security threat. It's not that your workforce is maliciously intent on leaking your info, it's that they often have no idea they are doing something wrong.

Reading through ex-hacker - and past ITWeb Security Summit keynote speaker - Kevin Mitnick's book "The Art of Deception", I was struck by how likely it would have been that I would have fallen for the lines used in his examples. And I consider myself a fairly security conscientious person, educated in the ways of the wicked world.

So I have to wonder how much more vulnerable are those employees who have no training or knowledge of these things?

The government of the time put out a simple message: "You are not allowed to complain." And so we don't; we simply roll over and play dead.

Kimberly Guest, Senior Journalist, ITWeb

While a charm offensive is often the most effective way of getting what you seek, yesterday's lead story on ITWeb, The big cellular rip-off, reminded me that whole communities can also be bullied into submitting to an organisation's will.

The fact is the cellular operators have been charging exorbitant cancellation "fees" since their inception, so why is it that we are only waking up to it almost a decade later?

It's social engineering people; we believe we can't fight corporates, question medical practitioners or negotiate terms with our financial institutions. Interestingly, this manipulation or propaganda stems back to the apartheid era where legislation was introduced to prevent strikes in the labour market.

The government of the time put out a simple message: "You are not allowed to complain." And so we don't; we simply roll over and play dead.

But there is a lot of power in standing up and saying No! And the more of us who do this, the less prevalent the consumer engineering becomes.

My son could have done the same thing; he could have looked at the doll, considered its appearance and questioned what was being said to him. If he had done so, he may have noticed the flaws in his sister's proposition.

Personally, I'm glad he didn't. For a good hour, the two played without argument, whining or crying, while I sat back, drank my coffee (while still warm) and tucked into a good book.