Little Brother, Chapter 2

Social engineering is the art and science of altering behaviour of individuals or of altering the outcome of a security measure. It is done by altering or convincing the individual or security measure to do something different than he/she/it originally intended. For example, sometimes you may socially engineer a situation with me to convince me to accept an assignment late – this can be done through perhaps pulling a fire alarm so that I cannot collect the work, or it could be done by convincing me that a later due-date would be advantageous to everyone. There are several instances of Marcus’ skills as a social engineer of both individuals and security to be found in this chapter; find at least one example of each.