As the social networking threats angle is picking up a lot of traction lately <pat_on_own_back>, the folks at Netragard have posted a great write-up on using social networks as an attack tool – involving both social engineering as well as technical exploits. The post can be found here, and I just want to quote a couple of sections that I feel very strongly about:
“The social reconnaissance enabled us to identify 1402 employees 906 of which used facebook. We didn’t read all 906 profiles but we did read around 200 which gave us sufficient information to create a fake employee profile†… “After the payload was created and tested we started the process of building an easy to trust facebook profile. Because most of the targeted employees were male between the ages of 20 and 40 we decided that it would be best to become a very attractive 28 year old female. We found a fitting photograph by searching google images and used that photograph for our fake Facebook profile. We also populated the profile with information about our experiences at work by using combined stories that we collected from real employee facebook profiles.â€
Needless to say that the newly created fake profile, which could just as well have been hijacked, went a long way in terms of enabling the attackers (who were commissioned to perform a penetration test this time) to gain access to internal company resources quite easily.
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