People Hacking

8:02pm. It's them again: "OH MY GOD!! They don't just have our future sales plans, they have our new product ideas. This is a disaster, I can't believe that someone could simply get our sales strategy as well as our unreleased product schematics. We have the finest computer security that money can buy so how did they steal all our ideas without anyone knowing about it?"

8:07pm. You know who, again: "We are doomed. While trying to email our network administrator, the computer just froze, said we have a virus, reset and now every computer in the office says the same thing 'Invalid Operating System, Please insert system disk.' I have a feeling we have been set up for a major disaster. Is there anything we can do about this?"

This is one of many stories that you will rarely hear about since companies have to keep good public relations or else stockholders/partners lose their minds and the business goes kaput. Theft of passwords, medical history records, credit card information, shipping manifests, sales projections, financial reports, social security numbers, patent ideas, and much more information, free services and goods than you can imagine are all at risk when your employees aren't trained to deal with someone who has their sights set on destroying you. Security awareness training and "alternate" security solutions are the only means of preventing these forms of attacks. The old adage 'it takes one to know one' fits perfectly because your average joe-schmo security guard or network administrator have little clue how any of this is done because even if they took special training, they simply don't teach it in their classes, ever.

Technical Security, Operational Security, Physical Security,

Personnel Security, Security Awareness Training

The scenario above could happen to your company and the thing that is completely outrageous is that it could be done LEGALLY! Yes, legally, since some 97.3% of the techniques used by social engineers(people hackers) never involve them using a computer to intrude on your network, most of them don't trespass and there are no laws whatsoever against one of your employees giving them the information they ask for, and, if that weren't enough, the information that is asked of them will seem entirely appropriate to give to the person who is asking thereby bypassing your firewalls and technical security altogether. That's scary, huh.This is information warfare we're talking about here, not a "simple" cybercrime that can usually be prevented by the standard methods.  Do they use surveillance? Do you need counter-surveillance? Preventing these techniques is crucial in many industries: banking, research and development, insurance, medical, billing, and especially any agency or business that has to be HIPAA compliant and realizes the consequences of a breach of your security.

Welcome to People Hacking. Committed to preventing industrial espionage, stopping competitive intelligence, reducing the effects of corporate sabotage and information theft one company at a time. We increase security awareness by outlining the concepts of how spies truly are everywhere and if you have anything to hide from anyone, your competition might be looking to find what that is. By analyzing your situation, most damage from attacks can be prevented entirely. Your competition could have someone invisibly and silently profiling your company to extract information or even sabotaging your whole business. Maybe not but do you really want to risk it and have it happen to you unexpectedly? Lawsuits are popping up everywhere from people who have had their confidential information stolen from companies that were supposed to be protecting it and new federal guidelines are awarding huge damages to these people. Wouldn't you like the peace of mind knowing that your employees are working in your favor in this situation now.

Check out this article about how people hackers are using a persuasion tool called neurolinguistic programming(NLP) to lull their victims into gleefully handing over private information and you can get a glimpse into the horrifying future of people hacking technology. Or a primer on the psychology of social engineering; it's not even remotely complete but it'll show you just about one percent of what kind of attacks are available to the average people hacker.