Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [79]
The best way to improve is to spend about five minutes a day going through these exercises.
Practice can help you to learn to control this vocal technique. For example, I am generally a loud person. It seems like I don’t have the ability to whisper. For me to control my tones, pitch, and volume, I need practice. Doing simple voice exercises like these can help you to control these voice characteristics.
When you speak a sentence in which you want to include a hidden command, and you want to lower your tone, being so subtle that the target doesn’t realize it is imperative. Otherwise, you will alert that person’s subconscious to trigger that something is amiss. If that occurs he may pick up on your attempts thereby shutting down your success.
Like most things in social engineering, if a technique doesn’t come naturally, practice is essential. Try this voice technique on your family and friends before you ever attempt it in an audit.
From personal experience, when I first started working on the Ultimate Voice techniques I decided my goal was to embed commands into questions. This goal took a while to realize but I would try simplistic things like:
“Honey, what do you want to eat for dinner tonight, steak or something else?”
To conclude this section, consider three things a social engineer should focus on when studying NLP:
Vocal tones. As stated previously, the tones of your voice as well as the emphasis you put on certain words can change the whole meaning of a sentence. Using tone and emphasis, you can embed commands inside of the subconscious mind of the target and allow the target to be more open to suggestion.
Chose your words carefully. Learn to choose the words that have maximum impact. Match positive words with thoughts you want the target to think positively on and negative words with those you want them to not think of too highly. This technique can also help the social engineer make a target more pliable.
Create a list of command sentences that you can use in person or during a phone social engineering audit. Writing out and practicing command sentences will help you be able to recall and use them when in need.
Most of all, practice. Controlling your vocal tones, the words you choose, and how you say them is not an easy task. Practice can make this become second nature.
NLP is a powerful topic, and, much like microexpressions, this section only scratched the surface. Once you start to master the techniques in NLP and the ability to read facial expressions, a next logical step is using these tools when interacting with a target. Next, this chapter analyzes the same tactics professional interrogators use.
Interview and Interrogation
Scenario 1: The door flies open and the perpetrator is noticeably nervous. Captain Bad-Mood comes over and grabs the perp by the collar and slams him up against the wall. Getting about an inch from his face he screams, “You’ll tell me what I want to know, one way or another!”
Scenario 2: The bad guy is tied to a chair, already bruised from the previous 30 minutes of beatings, and as the interrogator grabs a pair of shiny pliers he says, “You’ll be talking in no time….”
Scenario 3: The perp is sitting in a chair and two police officers enter the room. Calmly they walk over to the table and set a file labeled “Evidence” down on the table. Before they sit down they ask, “Do you need a coffee or a soda or something?”
Cracking open an ice-cold soda the first officer says, “Thanks for coming in today to help us out….”
Which one of the preceding scenarios is a real-life interrogation? If you guessed the third one, you’re right. It is how a real interrogation often goes. The first two have been portrayed in Hollywood movies and television series so much that many of us might think they are real. Outside of wartime scenarios and nations that do not ban the use of torture, the third scenario is most likely the way most interrogations begin.
Rarely will you