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Tech Fraud Beating Out Social Engineering
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 12, 2006 08:26 PM
from the is-this-good-or-bad-i-can't-tell dept.
from the is-this-good-or-bad-i-can't-tell dept.
The Walking Dude writes "BBC News asked Frank Abagnale if technology is driving the old-school conman into extinction. 'Mr Abagnale really ought to know', as the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can was based on his life. He served five years of a 12 year prison sentence for check fraud before being offered a job with the FBI. 'There may, after all, be life in the old con yet.'"
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Tech Fraud Beating Out Social Engineering
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Old Con? Social Engineering in today's workplace (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Now they all work in corporate america somewhere in Sales and Marketing department. Few of them even make it up to executive office. Social engineering is the template of sales and marketing.
Re:Old Con? Social Engineering in today's workplac (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.seanadams.com/)
And politicians?
Torrent for "Catch Me If You Can" (Score:5, Funny)
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3343505 [thepiratebay.org]
What about all those at Enron? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.futurepower.net/)
Hey, BBC writer, didn't you ever hear of Enron?
Re:What about all those at Enron? (Score:5, Funny)
What? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.poromenos.org/)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://tsfraser.googlepages.com/index.html)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 08 2004, @03:34AM)
Me: "Hey, what's your password? No wait, I'll just reset your password and you can change it when the computer restarts."
Teacher: "NO! I don't want to make a new password. I just want them all to be the same so I don't have to remember two or three. My password is 'steak'."
Me: *Sigh* "Okay..."
He's misreading things, I believe (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.berylliumsphere.com/security_mentor | Last Journal: Wednesday January 31 2007, @09:13PM)
Nor was Abagnale non-technical. One of his scames was so beautiful that you wish you could admire it, and it was based on manipulating the magnetic ink on a check to put the check-processing infrastructure into an infinite loop [snopes.com]. Talk about "float", especially since there was never anything behind the check in the first place. He'd withdraw the money after his victim bank decided "well, hasn't bounced yet, must be good".
Old scams are definitely still alive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just ask James Randi [randi.org] - he's been keeping track of dubious scams and claims for decades. Just read through a few of his newsletters if you ever want to be amazed at the things people will pretend they can do for money, power, or just plain delusion.
In my oppinion, healthy skepticism is something that should be taught to every school child as part of a minimal education. Knowing how to be properly, rationally skeptical is a very important skill - being either unskeptical, or holding irrational skepticism based on what you want to feel is as much a disability as not being able to read or do math. The scientific method helps if it is introduced comprehensively - but there's a LOT of scientists with doctorates that will be fooled by some of the simplest scams, then convince themselves they couldn't be fooled. Healthy skepticism is both knowing that you can be wrong, but you being wrong doesn't make someone else's extrordinary claims correct, even if it's an innocent mistake for all involved.
Especially disturbing are the constant resurgance of medical scams. People willing to try anything can be put through real hell by people willing to offer them an option that no one else will provide. The family of the dead rarely know to put any blame on a false cure, and the living often mistakenly promote as a miracle whatever was offered, so these scams can erupt almost anywhere. Add in scam artists using religion, blaming the dying for their own failed cure, and the unfounded skepticism of scientific medicine, and you can see how nasty these situations can be.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Old scams are definitely still alive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old scams are definitely still alive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Making a school class out of skepticism could be a delicate job. Designing a test that could be fairly applied to students without unfairly targetting subjects that are precious to people could be (politically) difficult. Still, it's a task well worth doing.
The ability to weigh skepticism rationally, to be able to accept not knowing things can be very tough skills to master. But I think most people would agree we'd be a lot better off if the basics of skepticism were a bigger part of public consideration.
The danger of such a class would be that it were poorly presented, most students end up concluding that they should just be skeptical about what they like to feel is wrong. That's how a scam artist uses the common sense ideas of skepticism. It's also how we fool ourselves into believing things we wanted to believe for irrational reasons. Other students may feel that they are being lead into mental paralysis by these endless considerations, and conclude effectively the same thing.
Still, I think such a class would be worth the potential for such mistakes. Even if all it does is make the "you're being skeptical" line in a discussion less of an insult and more of a legitimate consideration of unfair bias for people, it would be worth it.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Old scams are definitely still alive... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a moment...
Re:Old scams are definitely still alive... (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps a guy asked her to perform artifical resuscitation on his penis?
Perhaps this link is relevent? (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://zcat.wired.net.nz/)
It came up in the BPL discussion yesterday...
Slashdot admin message (Score:5, Funny)
Countermeasures (Score:1)
What disgusts me (Score:2)
The Story of Frank Abagnale (Score:1)
Frank's story is incredibly interesting and entertaining. Theres no way he would get away with some of his daring escapes today, such as posing as the fbi official when he was completely surrounded. Goes to show how much people have learned from this sort of activity, which is probably more of a contributing factor than technology. Any new form of payment or communication introduces new flaws which for a time only the cleverest can think to exploit, just with the interweb we see something so radically new and different that laws and security experts struggle to keep up.
A good account of the modern (Nigerian) scam (Score:2)
(http://geocities.com/cellocgw | Last Journal: Friday April 16 2004, @01:54PM)
Principle of Least Privilege Whitepaper (Score:2)
Re:Selective prejudice... (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @01:01AM)
Re:Was it cheque fraud, are the greatest all caugh (Score:2)
(http://clintonhawk.net/)
Re:Was it cheque fraud, are the greatest all caugh (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Things change (Score:1, Offtopic)
Ultimate Fighting is more popular and more relevant than boxing.
Re:Selective prejudice... (Score:2)
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