Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [135]
Figure 6-12: Aren’t babies cute?
Seeing the baby next to the tire makes you equate positive happy feelings with that brand. This is an example of classic manipulation.
Another advertisement (see Figure 6-13) that might have had many people wondering from Budweiser—remember those popular frogs belching out “Bud” “weis” and “er”? What do frogs have to do with beer? Along those same lines, think of the more recent Clydesdale horse and his gang of animal friends. These ads are catchy, even funny the first time, but not really explaining why you want to buy their beer.
Figure 6-13: Frogs selling lager.
This form of manipulation, conditioning, is subtle. You laugh at that commercial, and then later on you pull into your local beer distributor, see a cardboard cutout of the frogs or horse, and smile to yourself, which creates that positive feeling that makes you feel agreeable to buying the product.
These conditioning tactics are used often in the world of sales and marketing firms with the goal of manipulating the consumer to buy their products over the competition. Social engineers aren’t really selling a product, but they do want their targets to “buy” the lines they are selling, the pretext they are putting out there, and the actions they want the target to take. But why use manipulation? What are the incentives to utilizing this powerful form of control? The next section covers that very topic.
Manipulation Incentives
What are the incentives to manipulate someone? This question gets to the root of the methods, thinking, and tactics used in any manipulation. Not all manipulation is negative, but is related to the incentives behind it. But each incentive can be positive or negative.
What is an incentive? An incentive can be labeled as anything that motivates you to take an action. It can be money, love, success, or anything—even negative emotions like hatred, jealousy, and envy.
The main reasons why people chose to manipulate others can be broken down into three categories: financial, social, and ideological incentives. The following sections look at each of these incentives and how they apply to manipulation.
Financial Incentives
Financial incentives tend to be the most common, as in the cases mentioned earlier related to increasing sales. Many scams have a financial incentive behind their tactics.
How many people play the lottery every day with the hopes of getting that winning ticket? They may spend hundreds of dollars over time, and winning a $20 payoff makes them happy and keeps them coming back for more.
A non-malicious example of financial incentive is coupons. If you buy this particular product at this particular store you will get X dollars or cents off. If you are a thrifty shopper or want to try that product you will go to that store.
Many commercials that promote furthering your education, career, or skill set use financial incentives by painting a picture that your income will increase after their course or education.
The malicious attacker’s incentive for using manipulation is his own financial gain and therefore his motivation and his technique will reflect that. For example, if the malicious social engineer’s goal is to get his target to part with some of his hard-earned money, the social engineer will utilize pretexts that will be “allowed” to ask for money—pretexts like charity organizations are suitable in this scenario because asking for donations or financial information is not out of the ordinary.
Ideological Incentives
Ideological incentives are the most difficult to describe. Each person’s ideals are different and those ideals can affect the incentive. If your dream in life is to run a restaurant then that is your passion. You will work longer hours and put in more effort than any of your employees. You will also work for less money, because it is your dream or your motivation; for everyone