Social Engineering: Human Hacking is a Thing!

I wanted to bring some awareness to social engineering today.

Yes, majority of us as INFOSEC professionals are very familiar with social engineering and understand it as one of the most effective tactics used by the bad guys. We work to counter this through training and vigilance, but at the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to combat this. 

Our lives are filled with a lot of distractions. the brain can only process so much information at a sitting and only for so long before we encounter mental fatigue. We see this as we deal with stress at work between vacations. For me, I know it's time to unplug when I start getting edgy and little nuisances bother me. This is when we are at our most vulnerable as we are not as mentally acute, and we start rushing through things such as emails. This is one of the reasons phishing is so effective. This is one example of several S.E. attacks. 

This emphasizes the fact that we must "know ourselves" to be able to keep from being an easy target of social engineering. But, in the off chance we do fall for these shenanigans, we need to know basic incident response measures.