Social Engineering Task # 4

My task was create a new fake social media account and acquire at least 10 friends / followers that are strangers.

I created a Facebook profile with name ******  *****. Among the various social media, I chose Facebook because of its wide range of audience. I thought about using some fake attractive pictures to gain interest from people but discarded that idea because I didn’t want to misuse others picture. Once I created a profile, I visited news websites on Facebook where many people interact. Then I started to interact with people who are more active on those pages. After few interaction on those pages, I sent friend request to them, many of them responded. I even got few friend requests from other people.

My strategy was pretty effective, which started with selecting probable targets (friends), study about their nature, and accomplish my mission without any harm or foul. I did that within comparatively short period of time (5 days). I started interacting people by liking their comments and status on other interactive pages then joined the social, political, sports, and nationalist conversation of their interest. After couple of interactions on those pages, background was ready for friendship request. That worked pretty good to me even though I didn’t have any identifying profile picture, I got 23 friends so far plus few other requests; mission accomplished.

There was no moral stakes involved in this one. I had positive conversation with all those people and I do not have any negative intent to carry forward.

I feel like I can connect to the people who are active on social networking site and find out lot more about their private life. Interaction with various people helped me to understand their thought process somehow. That I could use for some real social engineering tasks later.

I was feeling good, this was the first task for me which didn’t involve any fellow players. The way I completed the task… I’m loving it. The interaction with the people was fun. It’s fun to see and know everything about others and not revealing anything about yourself. That was great fun and kind of freedom to express yourself on social media.