The way a lot of security pen-testers do social engineering calls by phone – “Hey, I’m <so and so> from IT. You have a virus. I need your password.” Rinse, repeat, and occasionally, you will get one or two people who will actually give you their password. The other 99% of the time, employees have been trained not to give out their password and rightfully so. “Well, we got a username and password, so it still counts…” But you also wasted time calling 50 other people before you got the credentials, which most likely put the company on high alert.
At the DEFCON 20 Skytalk, the presenter with the alias “Tanks4U” talked about the inefficiencies and the problems with using the commonly employed methods of social engineering, and the companies who hire security guys to call <x> amount of people for statistical purposes – specifically if it’s an all or nothing goal like getting credentials. You didn’t get them to give you the password? Hang up. They challenged or questioned you? Hang up. Try again with some other person. And it totally compromises the whole point to social engineering.
“You’re not supposed to tell them to jump in a river. You are supposed to take them to the river and convince them that they are on fire.” Social engineering isn’t just about a cold call to a person, it involves an interaction with the person on the other side and observation of person to get the reaction you need. In effective social engineering, you need to know the following:
- Know your goals – what details do you want to obtain? Username and password could be one, but what if you want the building layout? When does your cleaning staff come in? Who are the managers? Any details on the business that you can obtain can help you further in obtaining access to their business. Write them out on a piece of paper in a checklist. Make a scoring system. Ask them for things like the last four digits of their phone number, how their badges look like, last four digits of their SSN, etc.
- Know your target – it helps to observe how people react when faced with certain situations for this one. Go to a coffee shop before hand and sit there for a few hours. Watch how people interact with one another. You don’t have to be good at knowing how to social engineer people, just good enough to figure out how to small talk with others. Ask them questions about the weather or talk about hardships (ever had a flat tire or kids?), or engage in other commonalities that people share. Make a connection.
- Know yourself – sure you might know how to talk to others, but can you actually do it when it comes time? How will you react? Most people might get nervous and that is simply something you get over after you have some practice with social engineering. Public speaking also helps (try performing in a play and get your acting skills in shape). Or just sit in front of a mirror and practice your technique. Ultimately, though, it will come down to analyzing how you react in a live situation with other people. Remember the coffee shop? Go make small talk with those people that you were just observing.
In terms of the actual call or contact, performing the following steps will be key to establishing a good baseline for social engineering (or not! depending on the situation. Adjust accordingly with what you know above):
- Initiation – “Hi, my name is <so and so>. Is this <target>?”
- Pleasantries – “How are you doing? The weather sucks right now. How’s work? Busy today?” Establish a connection to your target through commonalities.
- Establish a pretext – who are you pretending to be? What is your purpose? Establish authority.
- Emotional injection – this is the start of the RIP phase (reactionary identity preservation). Ask them universal questions like, “Did you use Google today?” “Are you aware that we have an employee handbook? Did you read it?” Note that most of these are yes/no questions and that all of them should have the same response, no matter who you call (thus universal or almost rhetorical). This gets your target into an almost defensive stage and gives them a warm fuzzy feeling when they answer correctly – reassure them that they won the argument and play with their emotions. Get their responses (make them angry, worried, or comfortable).
- Team up – once you get them to emotionally connect with you on the problem that you have (oh you have a virus infection), work towards getting your goal by teaming up and fixing the problem. “Hey, so let’s just take care of this virus infection quickly” or “let’s figure something out”. Prepare to get your goal.
- Request an action – have them go to a website, give them their credentials, or open up a command shell and start typing things – whatever your goal is, ask them to do it now. If they refuse, don’t give up and try to obtain your goal some other way (Plan B, C, D…).
- Closing – Once you accomplish your goal, make them feel like the accomplished something as well. Give them reinforcement saying something like, “You did everything right, good job” or, depending on other emotional responses, give them other feedback like warnings, “Don’t open bad websites” or “let’s just keep this between us; I’d rather not have to tell your boss about this so that you don’t get in trouble.” This is a good phase to make sure that they don’t go and tell others about the incident so that you have more opportunities to contact others at the business.