A Memory Linked to a Smell and Private Information

I recall one night she confidently declared to a hopeful beau she was a marine biologist.

I am not doing Bloganuary.

In eleven years of blogging, I’ve never participated. This year, I answered one bloganuary prompt. Posting daily is a big commitment, and I have a life outside of blogging. Besides, do readers actually want to hear about my little personal quirks? It is an invitation to give away personal information should I wish to do so.

Keeping Personal Information Private

Ally Bean discussed how giving out basic details to a health professional could lead to a breach of privacy, and potentially be damaging, should some nefarious individual use that information to assume your identity.

Innocent people fall prey to what has been termed ‘social engineering,’ an act that gains and manipulates information gained legally or illegally. Think of passwords, card numbers, identity documents, and bank or financial details that are disclosed daily to institutions, persons, and commercial sites. Such details could be used to fraudulently make purchases, steal funds, or secure loans.

Identity theft is something our forefathers rarely dealt with.

Or did they?

Celebrity impersonators assume identities. It is nothing new. Granted, the impersonators are often a more improved and perhaps more entertaining version than the original.

Decoys assume the visual appearance of famous people. Think of military or political figures who deem they require protection – think of Hitler, Putin, or North Korea’s Kim Jong. Undercover police and detectives are well-versed in assuming fake personas. Imitating a profession or person has some social benefits.

A work friend, (no names mentioned ensuring privacy), had tremendous fun as a twenty-something conjuring up new professions each time she met someone new at a nightclub. One day she was a colonoscopy nurse, the next a symphony musician and the next a travel consultant.

I recall one evening she confidently declared to a hopeful beau that she was a marine biologist.

To her astonishment, the young male responded that he was also a Marine Biologist and began discussing research grants asking probing questions she could not answer.

Boing!

How Secure is your Private Information and Social Engineering

Social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. [Wiki] It is a way of divulging personal and private information for fraud or to gain access to electronic systems.

An example is the use of the “forgot password” function… An improperly-secured password-recovery system can be used to grant a malicious attacker full access to a user’s account, while the original user will lose access to the account.

Social engineering relies heavily on the six principles of influence established by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini’s theory of influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity.

People will do things that they see other people are doing. [the principle of Social Proof]

For example, in one experiment,one or more confederates would look up into the sky; bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were missing. At one point this experiment was aborted, as so many people were looking up that they stopped traffic.

wikipedia.org/

If enough people do it, others will gain confidence to do it themselves. Think of Frank Abagnale and other confidence tricksters of history.

Other methods used by social engineers include pretexting, waterholing, baiting, phishing, fishing, quid pro quo and tailgating. There is even the problem of who is shoulder surfing.

Read about each of these methods here.

Question: Do you check over your shoulder when using a public computer while travelling?

Suddenly there is a whole new level of risk.

And here I was, going to write about a bloganuary post about a memory linked to smell.

But that would be giving too much away, wouldn’t it?

How cautious are you with strangers or disclosing information on your blog?

Advertisement