Chapter One
When Innocuous
Information Isn't What do most people think is the real threat from social engineers? What should you do to be on your guard?
If the goal is to capture some highly valuable prize-say, a vital component of the company's intellectual capital-then perhaps what's needed is, figuratively, just a stronger vault and more heavily armed guards. Right?
But in reality penetrating a company's security often starts with the bad guy obtaining some piece of information or some document that seems so innocent, so everyday and unimportant, that most people in the organization wouldn't see any reason why the item should be protected and restricted.
THE HIDDEN VALUE OF INFORMATION
Much of the seemingly innocuous information in a company's possession is prized by a social engineering attacker because it can play a vital role in his effort to dress himself in a cloak of believability.
Throughout these pages, I'm going to show you how social engineers do what they do by letting you "witness" the attacks for yourself-sometimes presenting the action from the viewpoint of the people being victimized, allowing you to put yourself in their shoes and gauge how you yourself (or maybe one of your employees or coworkers) might have responded. In many cases you'll also experience the same events from the perspective of the social engineer.
Story Number 1 looks at a vulnerability in the financial industry.
CREDITCHEX
For a long time, the British put up with a very stuffy banking system. As an ordinary, upstanding citizen, you couldn't walk in off the street and open a bank account. No, the bank wouldn't consider accepting you as a customer unless some person already well established as a customer provided you with a letter of recommendation
Quite a difference, of course, in the seemingly egalitarian banking world of today. And our modern ease of doing business is nowhere more in evidence than in friendly, democratic America, where almost anyone can walk into a bank and easily open a checking account, right? Well, not exactly. The truth is that banks understandably have a natural reluctance to open an account for somebody who just might have a history of writing bad checks-that would be about as welcome as a rap sheet of bank robbery or embezzlement charges. So it's standard practice at many banks to get a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a prospective new customer.
One of the major companies that banks contract with for this information is an outfit we'll call CreditChex. They provide a valuable service to their clients, but like many companies, can also unknowingly provide a handy service to knowing social engineers.
The First Call: Kim Andrews
"National Bank, this is Kim. Did you want to open an
account today?"
"Hi, Kim. I have a question for you. Do you guys use
CreditChex?"
"Yes."
"When you phone in to CreditChex, what do you call the
number you give them-is it a `Merchant ID'?"
A pause; she was weighing the question, wondering what
this was about and whether she should answer.
The caller quickly continued without missing a beat:
"Because, Kim, I'm working on a book. It deals with private
investigations."
"Yes," she said, answering the question with new confidence,
pleased to be helping a writer.
"So it's called a Merchant ID, right?"
"Uh huh."
"Okay, great. Because I wanted to make sure I had the lingo
right. For the book. Thanks for your help. Good-bye,
Kim."
The Second Call: Chris Talbert
"National Bank, New Accounts, this is Chris."
"Hi, Chris. This is Alex," the caller said. "I'm a customer
service rep with CreditChex. We're doing a survey to
improve our services. Can you spare me a couple of
minutes?"
She was glad to, and the caller went on:
"Okay-what are the hours your branch is open for business?"
She answered, and continued answering his
string of questions.
"How many employees at your branch use our service?"
"How often do you call us with an inquiry?"
"Which of our 800-numbers have we assigned you for calling
us?"
"Have our representatives always been courteous?"
"How's our response time?"
"How long have you been with the bank?"
"What Merchant ID are you currently using?"
"Have you ever found any inaccuracies with the information
we've provided you?"
"If you had any suggestions for improving our service, what
would they be?"
And:
"Would you be willing to fill out periodic questionnaires if
we send them to your branch?"
She agreed, they chatted a bit, the caller rang off, and Chris
went back to work.
The Third Call: Henry McKinsey
"CreditChex, this is Henry McKinsey, how can I help you?"
The caller said he was from National Bank. He gave the
proper Merchant ID and then gave the name and social security
number of the person he was looking for information on.
Henry asked for the birth date, and the caller gave that, too.
After a few moments, Henry read the listing from his computer
screen.
"Wells Fargo reported NSF in 1998, one time, amount of
$2,066." NSF-nonsufficient funds-is the familiar banking
lingo for checks that have been written when there
isn't enough money in the account to cover them.
"Any activities since then?"
"No activities."
"Have there been any other inquiries?"
"Let's see. Okay, two of them, both last month. Third United
Credit Union of Chicago." He stumbled over the next
name, Schenectady Mutual Investments, and had to
spell it. "That's in New York State," he added.
Private Investigator at Work
All three of those calls were made by the same person: a private investigator we'll call Oscar Grace. Grace had a new client, one of his first. A cop until a few months before, he found that some of this new work came naturally, but some offered a challenge to his resources and inventiveness. This one came down firmly in the challenge category.
The hardboiled private eyes of fiction-the Sam Spades and the Philip Marlowes-spend long nighttime hours sitting in cars waiting to catch a cheating spouse. Real-life PIs do the same. They also do a less written about, but no less important kind of snooping for warring spouses, a method that leans more heavily on social engineering skills than on fighting off the boredom of nighttime vigils.
Grace's new client was a lady who looked as if she had a pretty comfortable budget for clothes and jewelry. She walked into his office one day and took a seat in the leather chair, the only one that didn't have papers piled on it. She settled her large Gucci handbag on his desk with the logo turned to face him and announced she was planning to tell her husband that she wanted a divorce, but admitted to "just a very little problem."
It seemed her hubby was one step ahead. He had already pulled the cash out of their savings account and an even larger sum from their brokerage account. She wanted to know where their assets had been squirreled away, and her divorce lawyer wasn't any help at all. Grace surmised the lawyer was one of those uptown, high-rise counselors who wouldn't get his hands dirty on something messy like where-did-the-money-go.
Could Grace help?
He assured her it would be a breeze, quoted a fee, expenses billed at cost, and collected a check for the first payment.
Then he faced his problem. What do you do if you've never handled a piece of work like this before and don't quite know how to go about tracking down a money trail? You move forward by baby steps. Here, according to our source, is Grace's story.
* * *
I knew about CreditChex and how banks used the outfit-my ex-wife used to work at a bank. But I didn't know the lingo and procedures, and trying to ask my ex- would be a waste of time.
Step one: Get the terminology straight and figure out how to make the request so it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. At the bank I called, the first young lady, Kim, was suspicious when I asked about how they identify themselves when they phone CreditChex. She hesitated; she didn't know whether to tell me. Was I put off by that? Not a bit. In fact, the hesitation gave me an important clue, a sign that I had to supply a reason she'd find believable. When I worked the con on her about doing research for a book, it relieved her suspicions. You say you're an author or a movie writer, and everybody opens up.
She had other knowledge that would have helped-things like what information CreditChex requires to identify the person you're calling about, what information you can ask for, and the big one, what was Kim's bank Merchant ID number. I was ready to ask those questions, but her hesitation sent up the red flag. She bought the book research story, but she already had a few niggling suspicions. If she'd been more willing right way, I would have asked her to reveal more details about their procedures.
You have to go on gut instinct, listen closely to what the mark is saying and how she's saying it. This lady sounded smart enough for alarm bells to start going off if I asked too many unusual questions. And even though she didn't know who I was or what number I was calling from, still in this business you never want anybody putting out the word to be on the lookout for someone calling to get information about the business. That's because you don't want to burn the source-you may want to call the same office back another time.
I'm always on the watch for little signs that give me a read on how cooperative a person is, on a scale that runs from "You sound like a nice person and I believe everything you're saying" to "Call the cops, alert the National Guard, this guy's up to no good."
I read Kim as a little bit on edge, so I just called somebody at a different branch. On my second call with Chris, the survey trick played like a charm. The tactic here is to slip the important questions in among inconsequential ones that are used to create a sense of believability. Before I dropped the question about the Merchant ID number with CreditChex, I ran a little last-minute test by asking her a personal question about how long she'd been with the bank.
A personal question is like a land mine-some people step right over it and never notice; for other people, it blows up and sends them scurrying for safety. So if I ask a personal question and she answers the question and the tone of her voice doesn't change, that means she probably isn't skeptical about the nature of the request. I can safely ask the sought-after question without arousing her suspicions, and she'll probably give me the answer I'm looking for.
One more thing a good PI knows: Never end the conversation after getting the key information. Another two or three questions, a little chat, and then it's okay to say good-bye. Later, if the victim remembers anything about what you asked, it will probably be the last couple of questions. The rest will usually be forgotten.
So Chris gave me their Merchant ID number, and the phone number they call to make requests. I would have been happier if I had gotten to ask some questions about how much information you can get from CreditChex. But it was better not to push my luck.
It was like having a blank check on CreditChex. I could now call and get information whenever I wanted. I didn't even have to pay for the service. As it turned out, the CreditChex rep was happy to share exactly the information I wanted: two places my client's husband had recently applied to open an account. So where were the assets his soon-to-be ex-wife was looking for? Where else but at the banking institutions the guy at CreditChex listed?
Analyzing the Con
This entire ruse was based on one of the fundamental tactics of social engineering: gaining access to information that a company employee treats as innocuous, when it isn't.
The first bank clerk confirmed the terminology to describe the identifying number used when calling CreditChex: the Merchant ID. The second provided the phone number for calling CreditChex, and the most vital piece of information, the bank's Merchant ID number. All this information appeared to the clerk to be innocuous. After all, the bank clerk thought she was talking to someone from CreditChex-so what could be the harm in disclosing the number?
All of this laid the groundwork for the third call. Grace had everything he needed to phone CreditChex, pass himself off as a rep from one of their customer banks, National, and simply ask for the information he was after.
With as much skill at stealing information as a good swindler has at stealing your money, Grace had well-honed talents for reading people. He knew the common tactic of burying the key questions among innocent ones. He knew a personal question would test the second clerk's willingness to cooperate, before innocently asking for the Merchant ID number.
The first clerk's error in confirming the terminology for the CreditChex ID number would be almost impossible to protect against. The information is so widely known within the banking industry that it appears to be unimportant-the very model of the innocuous. But the second clerk, Chris, should not have been so willing to answer questions without positively verifying that the caller was really who he claimed to be. She should, at the very least, have taken his name and number and called back; that way, if any questions arose later, she may have kept a record of what phone number the person had used. In this case, making a call like that would have made it much more difficult for the attacker to masquerade as a representative from CreditChex.
Better still would have been a call to CreditChex using a number the bank already had on record-not a number provided by the caller-to verify that the person really worked there, and that the company was really doing a customer survey. Given the practicalities of the real world and the time pressures that most people work under today, though, this kind of verification phone call is a lot to expect, except when an employee is suspicious that some kind of attack is being made.
THE ENGINEER TRAP
It is widely known that head-hunter firms use social engineering tactics to recruit corporate talent. Here's an example of how it can happen.
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Excerpted from The Art of Deception by Kevin D. Mitnick Copyright © 2003 by Kevin D. Mitnick. Excerpted by permission.
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