socialmedian: Never Mind Social Media, How About Social Hacking?

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Never Mind Social Media, How About Social Hacking?

Source: Mashable!

Aug 13, 2008

Summary

One of the basic tools of any good hacker has always been the ability to utilize the concept of social engineering as made famous by people like Kevin Mitnick and the Badir Brothers. The idea being -– according to Wikipedia — that “All social engineering techniques are based on specific attributes of human decision-making known as cognitive biases. These biases, sometimes called "bugs in the human hardware," are exploited in various combinations to create criminal attack techniques.”

While this type of ploy has been used to gain access to computer systems for various reasons, it also raises an interesting idea of it being used to get people to willingly do things on the Web that they might not think of doing on their own. Some might suggest that this is just another form of the mob mentality that we see in things like flash mobs, but I wonder if this isn’t just another form of social hacking.

Long before things like social networks and social media were the hot buzzwords used to spark VC feeding frenzies, things like Web forums and newsgroups were the main soc

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