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Social Engineering and Hacking

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Malware creators have used social engineering to maximize the range or impact of their viruses, worms, etc. For example, the ILoveYou worm used social engineering to entice people to open malware-infected e-mail messages. The ILoveYou worm attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in May 2000 when it was sent as an e-mail attachment with the subject line: ILOVEYOU. Often out of curiosity, people opened the attachment named LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs—releasing the worm. Within nine days, the worm had spread worldwide crippling networks, destroying files, and causing an estimated $5.5 billion in damages.

Notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick, who served time in jail for hacking, used social engineering as his primary method to gain access to computer networks. In most cases, the criminal never comes face-to-face with the victim, but communicates via the phone or e-mail.

Research Kevin Mitnick on the Internet. What was he able to do and how did he do it? Why did it take such a long time to be caught? How was he caught?

Please use at least 1 reference

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Solution Summary

This solution provides a discussion regarding hacking and social engineering.

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Social Engineering is the process of interacting with people to get them to, unknowingly, give you access to their system. The notorious Kevin Mitnick was known for his people skills and could manipulate people into giving out passwords to systems, or even clicking on an email. His charm and wit were more dangerous than his ability to remotely login into a server from another server going across known ports that were left unprotected and open to vulnerability (going DNS port 53 as an example).

Kevin started his exploits as a curiosity that became an obsession just to see what exactly it was that he could get away with. His obsession ...

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Danny Sava, PhD
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  • MBA, Grantham University
  • BSc, Grantham University
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