Talk:Social Engineering

From ChekMate Security Group

"Social Engineering, the USB Way" - Article from Dark Reading

• http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=95556 (submitted by User:Bgillam)

This is a great article. I believe that this type of social engineering would work in many different organizations. I also believe it would be difficult to manage and control. First you would need to have effective controls on your egress traffic to ensure that only certain ports are used (for example port 80). Port 25 should be blocked entirely from the user base as only the dedicated mail servers should be communicating on port 25 to the Internet. Now, adding these type of controls to prevent this type of attack only works if the trojan is communicating on an obscure port. If the ports being used were like port 80 then the traffic would bypass the perimeter defense. It may be possible also to add controls to the individual workstations to make it so that USB is disabled - this would likely depend on the OS and hardware. User education would also be essential - the user should be aware that this type of engineering is possible and that they should question connecting something to the corporate environment, even a usb thumb drive.

In any regards, I find this article to be very noteworthy. Thank you. (smcnaught) 11:35, 9 June 2006 (MDT)