Chapter 08: Exploiting Physical and Social Vulnerabilities

Question 1

Trust

Answer 1

The foundation of many social engineering attacks

Creating a perception of trust can be done in many ways, since most individuals want to trust others—that’s a target for social engineer

Question 2

Reciprocation

Answer 2

Relies on the target feeling indebted or that they need to return a favor to you

Question 3

Authority

Answer 3

Focuses on making the target believe that you have the power or right to ask them to perform actions or provide information

Question 4

Urgency

Answer 4

The sense that the action needs to be performed, often because of one of the other reasons

Question 5

Fear

Answer 5

Something will go wrong or someone will be punished if they don’t respond or help a common target

Question 6

Likeness / Similarity

Answer 6

Between the social engineer and target builds trust, as the target is set up to sympathize with the pentester due to similarities

Question 7

Social Proof

Answer 7

Relies on persuading the target that other people have behaved similarly and they should as well

Question 8

Scarcity

Answer 8

Related to fear-based approaches but focuses on there being fewer rewards or opptys, requiring faster action and creating a sense of urgency

DION NOTES
* Urgency is an approaching deadline (TIME)
* Scarcity is limited supply (QUANTITY)

Question 9

Helpful Nature

Answer 9

The straightforward truth about most decent people

When given an innocent oppty to be appreciated, a target will usually be helpful

Question 10

Social Engineering

Answer 10

Any attempt to manipulate users to reveal confidentialn information or perform actions detrimental to a system’s security

Hacking the human, not the tech

Question 11

Phishing

Answer 11

Social engineering attaack where the threat actor communicates with the victim from a supposedly reputable source to lure the victim into divulging sensitive information

In a generic phishing attempt, the pentester is sending an email for the attack—not targeting any user or group, just sending a massive email to a lot of people

Spearphishing
* More targeted, uses same targeting and techniques as normal phishing
* This is most often what is used in pentest vs generic phishing campaign

Whaling
* Focusing on key executives
* Dion says this is the most effective form of phishing he’s seen in pentests
* Execs are always busy and on the receiving end of 100s or 1000s emails a day, so they don’t always scrutinize the links
* Also they’re better targeted and the messaging is more customized to them

Smishing
* SMS text message phishing

Vishing
* Phone call phishing

BEC
* Business email compromise
* Occurs when an attacker takes over a high-level executive’s email account and orders employees to conduct tasks

Pharming
* Tricks users into divulging private information by redirecting avictim to a website controlled by the pentester or threat actor
* Usually involves hijacking the user’s browser settings or running a background process that redirects to a malicious site
* You can also add entries into the host.ini file to force a redirect to occur

Question 12

Social Engineering Tools

Answer 12

SET (Social Engineering Toolkit)
* Python-based collection of tools and scripts that are used to conduct social engineering during a pentest

BEF (Browser Exploitation Framework)
* Used to assess the security posture of a target environment using cross-site attack vectors
* Great tool for testing browsers and associated web servers and apps

Call Spoofing Tools
* Tools like Asterisk inside Kali can spoof calls over VoIP
* Hide your identity, but also if you’re doing an impersonation attack to have a number that looks like it’s from inside the org