Abstract

Layer 8 Exploitation, better known as Social Engineering is a threat, often overlooked but regularly exploited; to take advantage of what has long been considered the ‘weakest link’ in the security chain of an organization – the ‘human factor’. The following real-life story is a classic illustration of this: “In 1994, a French hacker named Anthony Zboralski called the FBI office in Washington, pretending to be an FBI representative working at the U.S. embassy in Paris. He persuaded the person at the other end of the phone to explain how to connect to the FBI’s phone conferencing system. Then he ran up a $250,000 phone bill in seven months.” -Bruce Schneier. “Secret and Lies”.