Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [102]
Rapport, Rapport, Rapport
Chapter 5 has a whole section on rapport building. Read it, study it, and perfect your rapport-building skills.
Developing rapport means that you get the attention of the person you are targeting and his unconscious mind, and you build trust within that unconscious portion. Mastering the skill of building rapport can change the way you deal with people, and when it comes to social engineering, it can change your whole methodology.
To build rapport, start where the person you want to influence is mentally—try to understand their frame of mind. Are they suspicious? Are they upset, sad, or worried? Whatever emotional state you perceive them to be in, start from there. Do not focus on your goals as much as focusing on understanding the person. This is a very vital point. This means a social engineer must understand his target enough that they can imagine where they are consciously. What are the target’s thoughts and state of mind?
For example, imagine you want to influence your dear friend to want to quit smoking or doing drugs or something else. Notice you don’t want to convince her to quit, but convince her to want to quit. Your goal cannot be about you, right? It must focus on the target. You can’t start your conversation with what her addiction is doing to you and how much you hate the smell, and so on. The argument has to be what is in it for her. You cannot start the conversation with a verbal attack about what the person has done to you with their habit, but you need to understand where that person’s frame of mind is, accept it, and come into alignment with it.
Social engineering is much the same: you can’t start where you are mentally. This is going to be struggle for many people. Do you know why she smokes? Do you understand the psychological, physical, or mental reasons why? Until you can really get into her shoes, you cannot build a strong rapport and your efforts at influence will fail.
In addition, you cannot always base the idea of building rapport on logic. I once was in the hospital with a dear friend who was dying from throat cancer. He had smoked for more than 40 years and one day he found out he had cancer. It spread fast, bringing him to the hospital to live out his last days. His children would come to visit and every now and then they would leave the room. I thought they were overcome with emotion. One time after they excused themselves I went out to comfort them and they were outside the hospital smoking! I was dumbfounded. I don’t smoke and have no desire to, and although I can understand how strong an addiction can be, I couldn’t understand how after seeing the pain their father was in, how they could raise a cigarette to their lips.
Logic would not win in this case. Telling my friend’s children why smoking is bad and how it will kill them would do no good—this information was useless because it was combative and only made me feel good in saying it, but did not align with their present frame of mind. Until you understand the person you cannot successfully build a good enough rapport to influence him or her.
Getting someone to want to do something is a blend of emotion and logic, as well as understanding and humility in many cases. Once I walked into an office I was going to do some work for and I had heard a funny comment outside, so when I walked in the main lobby I was chuckling. The woman behind the desk must have just done something embarrassing because when she saw me she immediately got angry and yelled at me, “It’s not very funny and you are a jerk.”
Now I didn’t know this woman and to tell you the truth I had a goal in mind that this interaction was not going to help. In addition, I felt insulted that she assumed I was laughing at her, and wanted to lash back at her. But instead, I saw