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Social engineering is an infosec skill
It turns out that social engineering is an information security skill, used by hackers and testers to test the security systems in companies, see how easy or difficult they are to compromise.
Didn't know that until I started reading Social Engineering today. Apparently it's about hacking the world's greatest vulnerability: People.
It's mostly useful for the propaganda project; covers much of the same ground as Robert Greene's works on seduction, power and influence. Also covers much of the same ground as NLP and neurosemantics, and the art of memetics.
But it also includes more detail on preloading people, building pretexts, and so on.
Super useful, you might say.
It did cause me to consider what it might mean to create an experiment to test a framework, given the book Social Engineering is filled with what you might call "worked examples" of deception. It's much harder in my case.
Social engineering, as defined in this book so far, is at the tactical, physical level. The work I'm pulling together is a stage before that: Beliefs and perceptions.
Though, have to say, the breakdown of the histories of communication models was timely and useful. Essentially, it goes like this:
- Set a goal
- Do your research
- Establish a pretext
- Elicit information you need (and action you want someone to take
- Take action.
Et voila!
I have dramatically oversimplified the methodology, but this is really the backbone of what it is.
Now that you've reached the end, pitch in $5 a month. It will increase the rate of production on the project, and enable the development of one of the world's most important frameworks: Metasocial propaganda and programming.
