Slashdot Mirror
Social Engineering Still Best Way to Crack Security
binaryDigit writes "The Register has an amusing article about a study done in the UK where office workers were asked tricky questions like 'What is your password', and 75% of the respondents answered... They were also asked ethical questions, 'If you found a file with your coworkers salaries, would you look', 75% would, and 38% would pass the information around! Read on to be both amused (esp. the CEO) and scared."
According to the article 90% of them gave their password away,
not 75%. 95% of the men and 85% of the women did.
It's sad because no matter how much I know this, people are
still able to shock me. 90% of them gave their passwords away!
I would've thought maybe 10% or 20%, but 90%?!?
As a corollary to this article, Kevin Mitnick's book "The Art of
Deception" is fantastic. I tend to think of myself as fairly
security conscious, but this book opened my eyes.
Social Engineering is a very real threat, something IMO will
take decades to be addressed. At a certain level I think Social
Engineering can never be totally defeated or even necessarily
defeated to any large degree. The problem lies with
efficiency. Any large organization that works with a large
number of external organizations is *extremely* vulnerable to
this type of attack, even with incredibly strong security
measures in place.
The company that I work for has very, very stringent control
policies for security. They are by far the most security
conscious company that I have ever worked for, yet I am
supremely confident that even a poorly executed Social
Engineering attack would be highly successful. There is no
doubt about it, when it comes to security humans are definately
the weakest link.
I wonder if the reason the numbers were a little low last year
was due to the september 11th attacks. After the attacks people
were highly conscious of security, but as time passes people
relax more and begin to trust other people more. They just
don't realize how small pieces of information can incur such a
large cost.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
If someone came up to me in a train station and said "I'll give you this free pen if you tell me your password", I'd just make something up and collect the pen.
... free pen.
'Cause, you know
Until the people who ran this survey actually *test* their findings, their data isn't very valid.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
This survey was taken at one of my local trainstations. It's completely stupid, some guy walks up to you and says 'I'll give you this pen if you tell me your computer password', person says anything to get free pen. wow 9 out of 10 people pretended to give out their passwords and in return they got a free pen, was any of these passwords tested to see if they worked? Were they asked where they worked, the type of computer they logged on to, the location, any other network questions? NO If it was done in a seriously way, such as inside an office building it'd be far lower, it's ridiculous to draw any conclusion from this, hell I'd say "my password is donkey" (i bet ppl will try that as my slashdot password now haha) in order to get a free crappy pen, who wouldn't?
WTF is a sig?
okay - I really laughed when I read this article ... but ...
The number of things that I have to remember a fscking account name and password for in my life in insane.
To make it worse, at work the sysadmins decided that we have to change network passwords every two months!!
So, I have in my head a 'password pool' of my eight favourites, and continuously cycle through them. At worst, when I am trying to login to something I haven't used in awhile, I have to try at most eight times (usually four times). I admit this is bad.
Social engineering attacks work because the rate these systems are introduced (all with their own unique authentication scheme) vastly exceeds the rate of the human and society's ability to organize information.
The best passwords from a technical standpoint are the worst from a social standpoint - the average net user probably has to remember a dozen or so passwords, and obscure combinations of characters are just not going to be remembered by people in this information-overloaded environment.
I don't have a solution - but calling the users stupid certainly isn't one. Indeed, perhaps we're the ones not paying attention.
In his book "Security Engineering"
"In conclusion, the main thing we did wrong when designing ATM security systems in the early to mid 1980s was to worry about criminals being clever; we should rather have worried about our customers - the bank's system designers, implementers, and testers - being stupid."