Lying is one of those skills that our culture paradoxically both admires and reviles. There’s a reason we lionize TV characters like Frank Underwood and Walter White, who manipulate the truth effortlessly with almost every sentence that slips from between their lips: Lying is cool. Sure, the consequences of the act can be terrible, but there’s something fascinating about a person able to deftly manipulate the truth to their own ends. That’s what makes this Daily Dot piece focused on the annual Social Engineering Capture The Flag event at Las Vegas’ Def Con hacker conference so fascinating.
The article, by Patrick Howell O’Neill, is an in-depth exploration of the origins and culture of the event, which gives competitors 30 minutes to lie, cajole, charm, and bluff as much sensitive information as they can over the phone from employees at pre-selected businesses, in imitation of real social engineers who “hack” people using deception and manipulation in order to steal valuable security information. The goal is to increase awareness of how vulnerable businesses are to these social engineering techniques, and how poorly trained their employees are to counter them. Along the way, the article illustrates which bits of information are of most use to social hackers—you should never, ever tell people what operating system your store’s computers use, apparently—and includes stories like this one, about a contestant who chose the wrong security expert to imitate: