Articles

Social Engineering Defense Contractors on LinkedIn and Facebook 2: Selecting the Targets

The next phase of Jordan Harbinger’s social engineering study involves joining the environment with potential targets who have top secret level clearances. The question is: was this just some face-to-face magic that social engineers, or myself, can work in person that was getting this type of result, or is...

Social Engineering Defense Contractors on LinkedIn and Facebook

Jordan Harbinger, expert in interpersonal dynamics and social engineering, gives a great keynote at DerbyCon event, highlighting the methods it takes to elicit confidential information from people with top secret level security clearance. Thank you guys for coming to DerbyCon, aka EarlyCon, aka HangoverCon...

PharmaLeaks 4: Spamming Techniques and Payment Service Providers

In his presentation’s final part, Damon McCoy dwells on the spamming strategies used by pharma affiliates, and breaks down the costs online pharmaceutical networks have to bear. Strategies for Spamming Now that we’ve looked at some general numbers on affiliates, let’s look at some of the top earning...

PharmaLeaks 3: Customer Acquisition and Affiliate Statistics

Damon McCoy highlights the customer influx trends and basic characteristics of the affiliates operating within the three major online pharmaceutical programs. Now that we’ve looked at product demand and demographics, let’s take a look at how these programs attract new customers (see graph). On the Y...

PharmaLeaks 2: Demographics and Revenue Structure for GlavMed, SpamIt and Rx-promotion

In this entry, Damon McCoy provides results of the study about customer base, products and revenue structure of major online pharmaceutical affiliate programs. In previous studies, a lot of people, including our group, have inferred just small little parts of these online businesses. And it’s always been...

PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs

Damon McCoy, Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Computer Science Department, gives a great presentation at USENIX Security Symposium dissecting the business model of spam-driven online pharmaceutical industry. I am going to be presenting our work on PharmaLeaks, or as I like to call it:...

Questions with Kevin Mitnick 5: Present-Day Hackers and Controversial Legislation

Final part of this interview is a Q&A section, where Kevin Mitnick answers viewer questions about his attitude to today’s hackers and other relevant matters. Shannon Morse: Well, Kevin, right now we are going to have some awesome viewer questions for you. Alright, so the first one comes from...

Questions with Kevin Mitnick 4: The Grey Hat Houdini of Hackers

Kevin Mitnick expresses his ideas on the state of security nowadays, discussing some real-world engagements he undertook and new projects coming up. Shannon Morse: Given that this book is kind of a look at your past days and hacking, is there anything you regret from the past days? Kevin Mitnick: Yeah, you...

Questions with Kevin Mitnick 3: Escaping Prosecution

In this part, the once most wanted hacker Kevin Mitnick tells Hak5’s Shannon Morse about his experience with the law enforcement when he was a fugitive. Shannon Morse: Speaking of people that you might have social-engineered, and same with the people that might have accused you of things: did you worry...

Questions with Kevin Mitnick 2: Social Engineering and Technical Hacks

This entry reflects autobiographic facts provided by Kevin Mitnick during his interview at Hak5, specifically outlining social engineering tricks he used. Shannon Morse: There were a whole lot of security flaws for a lot of corporates, a lot of companies that you write about in your book. Did you run into...