The Glider

Column by Mike Murray (content/category/7/39/24/) I was recently at a conference with a friend of mine who was visiting Vegas for a hypnosis conference, and I was explaining to him the biggest problem with most social engineering experts. And, of course, because I had been talking to him about amnesia, I promptly forgot about it. I was reminded of it when I was reading something that another social engineering expert wrote that linked hypnotic phenomena to the act of social engineering. So, I'll share the same caveat with all of you: if someone tells you that...

Column by Mike Murray (content/category/7/39/24/) These days, it’s hard to perform a penetration test without attempting some sort of online social engineering, and most often, this takes the format of some type of phishing attack (whether targeted or across a wide user base). While we spend epic amounts of time getting our exploits and payloads perfect (even if we’re using SET), far too often we see testers using stock emails or variants of canned emails that they’ve been taught to use without thinking about the real keys to getting their emails read and acted upon. These are my five...

As a social engineer, you spend all of your time manipulating people’s brains. Yet most of the social engineers I meet don’t know the difference between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. And you need to. So this article is going to give you a quick trip through the human brain. The brain isn’t just a single organism – it’s truly a three-part entity known as the triune brain. The idea of the triune brain was first proposed by Paul MacLean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D._MacLean). He proposed that the brain that you and your caveman ancestors shared is not a...