Social Engineering

[SarinMage]

social manipulatin is jsut having really good people skills, its not necessaraly a hack.

as i tried to say before

social engineering is a form of manipulation
hacking is a form of manipulation,
BUT
they arent the same thing

they are related
but not the same

[preacherman481]

Seems to me social engineering would not be a hack per se, but it would certainly qualify as a "tool" crackers use. I guess I'm making a distinction between "hacks" and the "tools" people use to do hacks.

[souleman]

For those of you that say social engineering is not a hack:

If you take spare parts from you garage, a few parts from Radio Shack, and put together a ham radio, do you consider this a hack? It appears that you would say no, because this has nothing to do with computers. If you look into the history of people becoming "hackers" that is where the term started. It was people that would do hardware "hacks" to get things to work. Then it became software "hacks." Many good pratical jokes were also considered hacks. If a joke can be a hack, that basically shows my point.

Hacking isn't about manipulation. When I used the comparison before, it was because someone else said it was. Hacking is about accomplishing a goal through non-standard means. Writing a report in Word isn't a hack, but if you create a word document (with formating and all) from vi or ed or even notepad, that would be a hack. IF you fix the muffler on your car with a coat hanger, you have hacked a fix.

The word hack can be applied to more then just computers.

[souleman]

Definitions:

hack
1. /n./ Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
2. /n./ An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.

http://www.instinct.org/texts/jargon...23.html#TAG824

A ``hacker'' is the opposite: someone who never goes to class, who in fact sleeps all day, and who spends the night pursuing recreational activities rather than studying......What does this have to do with computers? Originally, nothing.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html

Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'.

http://www.instinct.org/texts/jargon...jargon_44.html

Example:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and `interviewed' the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.

http://www.instinct.org/texts/jargon...jargon_44.html

[d313t3d]

Yeah, soulman, if you want to play at symantics, I agree. . .but I think you missed one of the defi's for hack, as I remember it, it was a writers term, originally. . .ie. hacking out a novel, 'he's not a novelist, he's a hack'. . .

[souleman]

I think you missed my point. My point was that not all "hacking" is directly used on a computer. If you look at the link for my example above, you will see that they considered that a hack, even to computer people, because they "reprogramed" the card stunts.

Maybe to you Social Engineering is not a hack. To other people it is. I personally believe that SE is a form of computer hacking, because of the security aspects. I don't care how good you are at security, the weakest link in any system is always the human, like SoggyBottom said. You can have your companies entire network offline, but if I can convince the person watching the door to let me in, your systems are now vulneable. It is a different set of skills, but I know people that have absoutely no people skills. If you go to the irc channel sometime, you will see what I mean. Quite often, there are people that couldn't convince their own parents that they were not really 5 years old, and still wearing diapers.

[SSJVegeta-Sei]

why even search Google when you can just visit the Sub7 homepage
Sub7 is the best tool I've ever used on my own system to get around windoze.

SSJVegeta-Sei

[SarinMage]

hacking=manipulating something to do something it origionally was not intended to do.

on a side note, i have a HAM license
my call is: N2ZLL

[AlienProtein]

hacking=manipulating something. Does this mean that when im manipulating my girl, im hacking?

[SarinMage]

yes alien... lol