Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [134]
Red can trigger strong emotions—use caution when using red. Even though it can denote power and impulsiveness, it can denote force, intimidation, and conquest, even violence and revenge. Be careful how you use red.
Orange: Orange gives warmth, enthusiasm, attraction, determination, strength, and endurance. It can stimulate a person to feel invigorated and even stimulate his or her appetite.
Orange is another color to be cautious with. Although using orange has many good benefits, like making the viewer feel warm and attracted to you or your product, too much or the wrong combination can create feelings of insecurity, ignorance, and sluggishness.
Gold: Gold is usually associated with illumination, wisdom, wealth, and prestige.
Yellow: Yellow is associated with energy and optimism, joy and cheerfulness, loyalty and freshness. It can cause a person to feel focused and attentive.
Yellow also has an impact on a person’s memory (why are so many sticky notes yellow?). Used in small amounts, it can trigger positive emotions, but too much can cause a target to lose focus or feel criticized.
Green: Green is often associated with nature, harmony, life, fertility, ambition, protection, and peace. It can produce a very calming effect, making someone feel safe.
Green is another power color but can also make one feel greedy, guilty, jealousy, and disordered if used in the wrong setting or used too much.
Blue: Blue is associated with the color of the sky and ocean. It can be linked to intelligence, intuition, truth, tranquility, health, power, and knowledge. It is very calming and cooling and has been known to slow down the metabolism.
Blue is the easiest color for the eyes to focus on. It can have many positive effects, but be careful not to make the target feel cold or depressed.
Purple: Purple is associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, creativity, and mystery.
Brown: Brown is associated with earth, reliability, approachability, convention, and order. It can create emotions of being rooted or connected, or having a sense of order.
How can you use all this information? I am not suggesting that with a simple blue outfit you can make someone feel calm enough to hand you her password. Yet you can use this information to plan your attack vectors, ensuring you have the best opportunity to succeed, which includes how you look and how you are dressed.
A social engineer would want to analyze the target they will be calling on and make sure the colors they choose to wear augment their ability to manipulate the target and not turn them off. For example, knowing that green may elicit feelings of greed or ambition can help a social engineer decide not to wear green to a meeting with a charity where it might conjure feelings and emotions contrary to the charity’s mission. Wearing something blue to a lawyer’s office, on the other hand, can have a calming effect, allowing the lawyer to open up more. Careful planning and sensible use of these tactics can help ensure the success of your social engineering audits.
Conditioning Targets to Respond Positively
Conditioning is used in everything from normal conversation to marketing to malicious manipulation. Just like Pavlov’s dog, people have been conditioned to respond to certain items. Human nature is often used to manipulate the majority of people to take actions the manipulators want.
When the majority of people think of babies they will smile, we will find talking animals “cute,” and we might even be manipulated to sing a jingle for a popular product in our head.
These tactics are so covert that many times we don’t even know they are working. Many times I find myself wondering what a scantily clad, bikini-wearing woman has to do with beer.
One example of how conditioning is used is Michelin Tires (see Figure 6-12). For years this company has used babies in its ads. Why? “Because so much is riding on your tires.” But these ads have more to them. You see a baby, you smile, and you are happy. That emotion triggers a positive response, and that response