Social Engineering Task # 2

My task was to “Find out what street a fellow player lived on as a kid”

With my prior experience, this time I decided not to engage in any direct conversation with any player regarding my task. Instead, I tried to use online resources and various networking sites as my tool to find required information of my potential target. Now, it’s hard to fool anybody from my class regarding their childhood and personal stuff. Without little knowledge of pre-background of my target, it’s a tough job to accomplish.

I started searching online profiles for the various players from our class and slowly started to narrow down my search to three players. I used various online resources like: www.instantcheckmate.com, www.whitepages.com, www.peoplesmart.com, and www.spokeo.com. I also used various social and other networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, twitter, LinkedIn etc. When I collected enough resources about them, finally I focused on Ms. Pinky Toe. I thought, I found my required information; she lived on P*****n St and W*****t Rd. as a kid.

I think my strategy was pretty effective as utilizing “do your job” as my mantra, regardless of various dilemmas. Considering the fact how very little information (or no information) we have about our target, this was pretty good. If we chose to, there are various paid online sites which almost pin point tell us the whole history of a person provided that we know little bit of their information such as family and addresses.

Almost spying on your classmate is never going to give you a feeling of greatness, but I took it as a learning curve. My moral stake was okay because I harmed nobody and didn’t do any illegal activity to accomplish my mission.

Social, and other networking sites are great tool to find out personal information and choice about a particular person. Who so-ever reveals too much information on web they are likely to get targeted more than others. This skill could be applied to make our web life more secure.

I got lucky?? again by selecting a topic which absolutely requires direct involvement of a fellow player or at least his/her acknowledgement/involvement. Once I chose the task, nothing I could do but to focus on accomplishing the mission. While doing this task, I was okay with the way I did my research. I didn’t enter paid sites, and didn’t do anything which would be considered as illegal. I was even able to get phone numbers. I thought to make calls to the numbers I acquired to cross check but that could have created some unnecessary attention, so, I limited myself to what I did. I wish, we had little more time to complete the mission and we had more information regarding the target than what we have right now, I am cool though.