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No-Fail Identity Theft – Live and In Person
ancientribe writes "A researcher performing social-engineering exploits on behalf of several US banks and other firms in the past year has 'stolen' thousands of identities with a 100 percent success rate. He and his team have posed as investigators for the FDIC (among other things), and numerous times have literally been able to walk out the door with pilfered identities. The reason: organizations are typically so focused on online ID theft that they've forgotten how easy it is for a criminal to socially engineer his way into a bank branch or office and physically hack it."
The human element.
Defective Logic
Internet theft: Wholesale
in-person theft: Retail
We make up the difference in volume!
I'm not worried about Retail level theft. It's the wholesale one that is more worrisome.
if internet theft has a success rate of 1 in a thousand but puts millions of people at risk it's more worrisome.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
people are the weakest link in any security system. Film at 11.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I don't know if you can say it's related to online identity theft though; this sort of social engineering predated that by decades, and its always worked well.
So much of it is about knowing the right number to call, or the right person to approach.
People just need to be suspicious, but suspicious is massively unhelpful to people who legitimately need help. No one ever calls me for security credentials because I am the documentation gestapo; instead they approach one of the other people who can set them up, because they know that those people won't ask as many questions.
On the one hand, I know I don't need to be as thorough as I am, on the other hand I know that the one time I'm not, I'll give access to the wrong person.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
When someone from some esteemed institution of higher learning discovers this, then maybe the "identity theft" groupthink will end.
#1. Banks make money when your identity is stolen The profit comes in the form of transaction penalties when you start reversing the charges and possibly the bank's "identity theft services."
#2. No one seems to have any interest at all in shedding some light on the credit process. Why isn't it quite transparent to all consumers?
The entire "identity theft" scheme works is overwhelmingly favors the banking industry and it's no one's fault but ours.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Pretend to be a researcher. Approach bank president. "Hi, I'm Bob Researcher from State U. I'd like to test your bank's security for you." [insert fear mongering as necessary]
If successful, yay! Free identities!
If unsuccessful, meh. You're legit!
While it may have a higher success rate, the fact of the matter is that "in-person" identity theft poses a much higher risk ratio for the would-be criminal.
I'm sure if the researcher were really going to jail for his "crimes", he might not be so cavalier (and calm) when committing them, and this might affect the 100% success rate.
Or maybe that is another thing that should make the people work at the credit union say "WTF is the FDIC doing at a credit union?"
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
At risk of dating myself here, I will mention that during the whole Mitnick thing, (big press about social engineering "dark side hacker" back then) I wrote a paper in a sociology class, and proved it beyond my wildest dreams. (Granted the presentation was done to a batch of people with glazed eyes.) The topic? That despite all the hullabaloo, the vast majority of "the masses (tm)" are still just as brick/rock stupid or at least very ignorant, just as they were before social engineering was brought to the newsfront by over eager media people looking for someone to demonize.
Do not be upset. Stupid people are there so that intelligent or smart people are given a reason to shine. If everyone was smart, you'd be another drop in the bucket, but if you are, and they are not, then be happy you're stronger, smarter or better off, enjoy the advantage, help others if you want, or avoid helping them, all up to you.
All in all (back to my paper in question) I think I only had a few people turn me down for providing private info. It was then that I realized that "security" auditing was a joke for any company that is not so small that the employees and employer know and care about each other. Tall order in today's societal tendency for a lack of responsibility. Until people are held accountable for their actions by other people, regardless of the piece of paper they hide behind (be it a corporate charter or some other set of excuses for bringing harm to others), until people are held accountable by those whom they harm, nothing will change. Therefore, I wager nothing will EVER change, since the vast majority are cowards. The upside, is that this has created a veritable "garden of eden" for those of us that do not suffer from lack of courage or lack of vision.
If there truly is a God, he must be one sarcastic dude, because, as far as I can tell, he despises stupid, weak people, and does everything possible to give them a shock to wake them up. And, despite my dislike for Churchill, this quote is a classic "sometimes a man may trip over the truth, but sadly, very often he just picks himself up and goes on." So don't feel pissed that most employees don't care. Their entire social structure is built on irresponsibility, rudeness, and triviality. Why do you expect them to behave as exemplars of honor, honesty and integrity, when the very system they seek to be rewarded by, is not based on such ideas? (No, paying lip service to "honesty" does not make one honest, same thing with honor or integrity or a hundred or more other ideas one can name.)
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
My gut feel, upon reading your description, is that no-one is that good. I would be very interested to know if any teams like the one in TFA have actually tried to break the security at the IRS.
Possible holes : everyone seems fixated on those ID badges. Precisely what is the security on those? RFID, or is it a magnetic strip?
Magnetic strips can be copied. RFID chips are more difficult and take serious hacking.
Other simple tricks : are the PCs at the IRS running windows? Would a simple trick like the "drop a few USB dongles in the employee smoking area" work?
Finally, there's insider information. Somehow, I doubt the IRS pays people very well. There must be all kind of employees with IT jobs who could physically copy from computers containing millions of tax records.
Information is inherently far, far more difficult to secure than a physical item. I would be greatly surprised if the security were as airtight as you make it out to be.
The problem with this is two-fold:
First, the folks in control of implementing such technology classes would do the usual (let's memorize IE8 and Office 2008) in order to make people more "productive" instead of teaching people the overall context of DRM, net neutrality, black-box voting, and the like.
Second, even if you could get reasonable content in the class, most students wouldn't give a damn. "But I can use my iPhone (see: I'm using it now!)- therefore, I am tech saavy and this class is stupid."
Until the powers that be in education see the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, they will ignore the larger issues of being informed about our digital commons.
There are places with tight security like that, and I've been to some of them. The overhead is high. For bidding purposes at a major aerospace company, we used to estimate that running a project at SECRET doubled the bid, and running at TOP SECRET ran the price up by 4x or more. At the higher levels, computers are in metal rooms with welded seams raised off the floor (so Security can check underneath) and with RF-tight airlocks. Signing documents in and out of files takes a big chunk of staff resources and time. There's a big bureaucracy associated with accountability.
One of the serious side effects of running highly classified projects is that the people working on them become obsolete in place. They're so cut off from the outside world that they don't keep up, outside their very narrow area of expertise. That's why I left aerospace and went to the commercial world.
Umm, I'm sure there are ways. See numerous movies for a method. Or buy a badge from a fired employee. I mean, since EVERY employee has an ID badge, they probably follow the same template. It would be the work of a few days to create a near-perfect fake. The "look" of the badge itself secures nothing, there are numerous websites out there explaining in great detail how to replicate virtually any badge or ID card.
The CODES on it are the only security : to pass those electronic locks, you would need a badge that has either an internal chip or a magnetic strips. Mag strips are trivial to copy. The internal RFID chips are the only secure thing on any of those badges.
But backing away from specific methods, since I am not a criminal, my main point is that it's the government. It can't possibly be as secure as you think it is, the government is generally incompetent.