Social Engineering Challenge # 2

The task:  To get someone to let you hold their phone unlocked for at least 5 seconds.

Did I accomplish it? Yes, I did.

Execution: I thought about the best way to approach this challenge and I came up with a plan: to ask somebody if I could borrow their phone in order to make a call because mine had died. So  I asked my co-worker to borrow her cellphone and I got to hold the phone unlocked for longer that 5 seconds, I held it for about a minute while I was pretending to dial and then I gave it back to her and told her that nobody answered.

Application: Anybody who wanted to get private information from somebody could pull the same trick and steal information from somebody’s cellphone, this will depend on how the person who owns the cellphone reacts in terms of paying attention to what the person is doing with their cell phone. In my case my coworker was actually standing next to me and she did not take her eyes off me while I was using her cellphone but other people could be less careful about it. Also it will depend on how tech-savvy the person who wants to steal the information is because you could also pretend to be dialing a number and quickly install some sort of software that will allow you to access the cellphone later or you could also just dial some sort of code which will give you access (I am not sure about the details).

Ethical reflection:  The ethical issue that this task raises is  that you must be careful about who you let use your cellphone and also you must take precautions in terms of what kind of information you have in your cellphone.

Somebody could do the same thing to do something ethically wrong such as to steal or to spy on private information in order to blackmail, gain monetary profit (if the person has credit card information or any other bank account information) or even to bully somebody if they decide to steal personal pictures.  

The only way that somebody could do this ethically right would be to ask for legal  permission before collecting the data  which could be done by taking the proper legal steps in a case in which there is/are reasson/s to collect evidence.