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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.
Actually, that's not as good as telling them you're selling photocopiers. Don't remind people about security when you're trying to steal stuff; sometimes it jogs their memory to the boring security lectures they sat through during their first week of work.
The absolute best way to go about it is to be in a semi-authority position where you need information, and you have a right to information. If you need it, and you are perceived to have a right to it, then people will go out of their way to find it for you.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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
Banks make money by borrowing your money (at a low interest rate) and loaning it out to someone else (at a higher interest rate). If your identity is stolen in a big way, then any fees you pay to reverse bad transactions or identity-protection services you take part in are going to be outweighed by the fact that your money is quickly dissapearing (and thus no longer available to be loaned out by the bank).
It's in the best interest of the bank to keep your money in their vault; identity theft typically results in the exact opposite.
Identity theft (at the scale we see it now) is relatively young, and so it's understandable that banks and credit unions don't really have a developed, effective strategy to protect the customer... but as the parent says, given the shroud of secrecy that surrounds much of the banking and credit industries, a little transparency might go a long way to illuminate danger areas, so we don't have to rely on proof-by-egg-on-face as in TFA.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
And let's remember that this applies to emergencies as well. If you see someone in a crowd who needs medical help, go help him, and call for assistance if he needs it. Don't assume somebody else will do it; everybody else is going to assume that too! If you're the one who needs medical assistance, or you're with that person, don't shout out "call 911." Pick a person out of the crowd, point to him, and say, "You, call 911."
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
What annoys me are banks/companies in the UK who do this:
Me: Hello?
Them: Hello, this is LloydsTSB/BT/some other company. Is this <My Name>?
Me: Yes
Them: OK, for security, I have to ask you some questions. What is your date of birth?
Me: I'm not giving that sort of information out to some random on the phone - how do I know you're who you say you are?
Them: I'm ringing on behalf of LloydsTSB/BT/some other company.
Me: Sure, you said that. Tell me what my account number is then
Them: I can't do that until you've identified yourself.
Me: Bit of an impasse then, isn't it?
Sure, they know my name and number. I'm guessing it's not that hard to find that out though.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Actually.. clue #1 is that someone called YOU and asked for personal information. My counter to that (assuming I ever am confronted by it)? Get their name and tell them I must call them back, then call back to that company's main number. Chances are that once I ask this scammer his name, he hangs up on me.
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.
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.