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#4. Social (Engineer) Networking
#4. Social (Engineer) Networking
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are a social engineer’s paradise. A social engineer can find out so much about you from these sites. People post information about where they work, what they like to do, what bands they like, and more. A social engineer can use the information you post on your social networking page in a number of ways:
- Sending an email impersonating a friend listed on the page asking for confidential information.
- Viewing pictures of a person to find out popular hang-outs and then showing up at the same spots to social-engineer the person outside of a work environment.
- Discovering the person’s age, place of birth, school, and previous companies, which can all be used to target the person in a spear phishing attack.
- Adding the person as a friend to build up an online relationship with a person in order to build trust. The social engineer then exploits that trust to get information from the person which could be used to launch another attack.