Defend I.T.: Security by Example

Chapter 13. A Low-Tech Path into the High-Tech World

When was the last time you scored some free food at a restaurant by sweet-talking the waiter or waitress? How often have you extracted some “extra” information from someone by giving him that extra glass of a vintage Merlot? These scenarios are examples of social engineering. If hacking can be defined as gaining access to network resources and/or data to which you don’t have rights, then in the computer world social engineering can be considered hacking by any nontechnical means at your disposal.

In today’s high-tech world, we seem almost entirely focused on technical means of compromising networks (and most focused on viruses and worms), but as long as humans are involved in running or managing ...