Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [28]
In interpersonal communications two layers of messages are being sent: verbal and nonverbal.
Communication usually contains a verbal or language portion, whether it is in spoken, written, or expressed word. It also usually has a nonverbal portion—facial expressions, body language, or some non-language message like emoticons or fonts.
Regardless of the amount of each type of cue (verbal or nonverbal), this communication packet is sent to the receiver and then filtered through her personal reality. She will form a concept based on her reality, then based on that will start to interpret this packet. As the receiver deciphers this message she begins to unscramble its meaning, even if that meaning is not what the sender intended. The sender will know whether his packet is received the way he intended if the receiver gives a communication packet in return to indicate her acceptance or denial of the original packet.
Here the packet is the form of communication: the words or letters or emails sent. When the receiver gets the message she has to decipher it. Many factors depend on how it is interpreted. Is she in a good mood, bad mood, happy, sad, angry, compassionate—all of these things as well as the other cues that alter her perception will help her to decipher that message.
The social engineer’s goal has to be to give both the verbal and nonverbal cues the advantage to alter the target’s perception so as to have the impact the social engineer desires.
Some more basic rules for communication include the following:
Never take for granted that the receiver has the same reality as you.
Never take for granted that the receiver will interpret the message the way it was intended.
Communication is not an absolute, finite thing.
Always assume as many different realities exist as there are different people involved in the communication.
Knowing these rules can greatly enhance the ability for good and useful communications. This is all good and great but what does communication have to do with developing a model? Even more, what does it have to do with social engineering?
The Communication Model and Its Roots
As already established, communication basically means sending a packet of information to an intended receiver. The message may come from many sources like sight, sound, touch, smell, and words. This packet is then processed by the target and used to paint an overall picture of “What’s being said.” This method of assessment is called the communication process. This process was originally outlined by social scientists Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1947, when they developed the Shannon-Weaver model, also known as “the mother of all models.”
The Shannon-Weaver model, according to Wikipedia, “embodies the concepts of information source, message, transmitter, signal, channel, noise, receiver, information destination, probability of error, coding, decoding, information rate, [and] channel capacity,” among other things.
Shannon and Weaver defined this model with a graphic, as shown in Figure 2-8.
In a simple model, also known as the transmission model, information or content is sent in some form from a sender to a destination or receiver. This common concept of communication simply views communication as a means of sending and receiving information. The strengths of this model are its simplicity, generality, and quantifiability.
Figure 2-8: The Shannon-Weaver “mother of all models.”
Shannon and Weaver structured this model based on:
An information source, which produces a message
A transmitter, which encodes the message into signals
A channel, to which