Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [36]
How does that work? The person’s spirit or energy is relayed to your “sensors,” that data is correlated with past experiences, and then a judgment is formed. People do it instantaneously, many times without even knowing it. So your energy when you are going to elicit must match the role you are going to play. If your personality or mental makeup doesn’t enable you to easily play a manager then don’t try. Work with what you have. Personally, I have always been a people person and my strong suit is not topics like chemistry or advanced math. If I were in the situation mentioned earlier I would not try to play the role of a person who knows about those things. Instead my elicitation might be as simple as a stranger interested in starting a conversation about the weather.
Whatever methods you chose to use, you can take certain steps to have the upper edge. One of these steps is called preloading.
Preloading
You stand in line to buy your $10 movie ticket and are barraged with sensory overload of posters of upcoming movies. You stand in line to buy your $40 worth of popcorn and drinks, see more posters, and then you push your way through to get a seat. Finally, when the movie starts you are presented with a series of clips about upcoming movies. Sometimes these movies aren’t even in production yet, but the announcer comes on and says, “The funniest movie since…” or the music starts with an ominous tone, a dense fog fills the screen, and the voiceover intones, “You thought it was over in Teenage Killer Part 45….”
Whatever the movie is, the marketers are telling you how to feel—in other words, preloading what you should be thinking about this movie—before the preview starts. Then the short 1–3 minutes they have to show you what the movie is about is spent showing you clips to entice your desire to see the movie and to appeal to the crowd that wants the comedy, horror, or love story.
Not much has been written about preloading, but it is a very serious topic. Preloading denotes that you can do just what it says—preload targets with information or ideas on how you want them to react to certain information. Preloading is often used in marketing messages; for example, in the national restaurant chain ads that show beautiful people laughing and enjoying the meal that looks so beautiful and perfect. As they say “yummm!” and “ohhh!” you can almost taste the food.
Of course as a social engineer you can’t run a commercial for your targets so how can you use preloading?
As with much in the social engineering world, you have to start from the end results and work backward. What is your goal? You might have the standard goal of elicitation to gain information from a target on a project she is working on or dates she will be in the office or on vacation. Whatever it is, you must set the goal first. Next you decide the type of questions that you want to ask, and then decide what type of information can preload a person to want to answer those questions.
For example, if you know that later tonight you want to go to a steak place that your coupon-loving wife doesn’t really enjoy, but you are in the mood for a rib eye, you can preload to get a response that may be in your favor. Maybe earlier in the day you can say something like, “Honey, you know what I am in the mood for? A big, juicy, grilled steak. The other day I was driving to the post office and Fred down the road had his grill out. He had just started cooking the steaks on charcoal and the smell came in the car window and it has been haunting me ever since.” Whether this elicits a response at this exact moment is not important; what you did is plant a seed that touched every sense. You made