Social Engineering Challenge # 8

The task: Get a picture of a fellow player’s family member (without asking them for it).

Did I accomplish it? I think I might have accomplished the task but I do not have a final confirmation yet.

This might be a member of Private Plum’s family: her dog.

Narrative/method: This was a complicated task. First I thought I had it all resolved because the day I got this task I was talking to Princess Lovely Pink  and I asked her if we could become Facebook friends. She immediately made me promise that I would not invade her privacy in order to accomplish these tasks. Hence after that this became a really tough task since I do not talk to that many people at class out of lack of time and because I do not have anymore classes with anybody from this class. Since I have missed two of these tasks already I saw myself under pressure to accomplish this task so unfortunately I decided to take an ethically wrong approach. I decided to look up information on google by using one of the names I have from one of our fellow players: Private Plum. I looked through some of the information I found and I came with a profile from a social page (/www.flickr.com) in which you only post pictures. For my good luck the profile was not private and it had her name on it so I assumed it was her and I proceeded to look for what I needed until I found the picture of what I am assuming is her dog. A dog is a human’s best friend, hence he or she is a valid member of Private Plum’s family.

Application: Anybody could take the same approach in a real life situation in order to find information about a target by using their name or email. Although I did not find a picture of the target herself in this profile, I did find a whole lot of other pictures which could give somebody some leverage in order to blackmail her by proceeding to gather some of her personal information like whether or not she has a pet, where has she traveled to, who are her friends, etc.

Ethical reflection:  Although it is not illegal to stalk somebody online I find it ethically wrong because you are still invading that person’s privacy. This task raises the issue we have when it comes to posting pictures on any public profile with our names on it instead of a nickname or undercover name in order to avoid exposing ourselves to some of the dangers involved which I previously mentioned.