9/3/08: Notes and Personal Security

Since my Blackboard account is slow in coming, I will have to put Power Point slides up online for now. You can find today's here.

Extras:
Social Engineering

We will discuss Social Engineering in the class and also talk a little about one of the best known social engineers. Here is a video on how to social engineer a free pizza:



The Social Engineering Panel at The Last HOPE



C|Net article on this panel

Pretending to be something you aren't

We will discuss an article from wired about a mole from the media who attended Defcon. The organizers suspected that she was in fact a reporter, in spite of the fact that she refused to buy the media pass instead of the regular one. She was hoping to out agents and others doing ``illegal activities'' and even commented on

How the people in Kansas would be interested in what takes place [at such events].

She then made the mistake of telling others her intent and revealing her hidden camera, so her unveiling was inevitable:

Phishing

We will also discuss Phishing, which is a type of social engineering. Here is a Phishing IQ test so you can see how tricky some of these guys can be.

We will take a look at a fraudulent email I received and a whois lookup to see which country the email is coming from. This is a Nigerian Letter or 419 fraud letter. There is a website called 419eater that is dedicated to fighting these fraudsters.

Bullying

Megan Meier was a teenager with some teenage problems who was duped by some ``friends'' including the mother of one of these friends. They had created a fake profile of a teenage boy and engaged in conversation with Megan. Eventually, they started to harass Megan with the fake profile and she took it rather badly and killed herself.

Here are some articles:

http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9819394-56.html
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/blog-readers-ou.html
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/megan-meier-sui.html

Some readers became so outraged that they outed the adults that had duped Megan and posted not only their names, but places of business, phone number and address. Then one of the bloggers who had outed them got outed herself:

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/11/vigilante_justice

An even odder turn in the case, is that of a blog that surfaced as a comment in another article called ``Megan Had it Coming.'' The writer of the blog at some point ``confessed'' to being Lori Drew, or the mother of the child who was friends with Megan, and had harassed her to her death.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=14913
http://sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/megan-the-bitchhad-it-coming-or-how-to-kill-a-child-twice/
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/08/internet.suicide.ap/index.html

The blog was posted here:

http://meganhaditcoming.blogspot.com/

It was recently revealed that the blog was a creation of an Internet Troll.