Social Engineering Techniques

Company X's physical (building) security includes badges for all employees, locked doors, security guards, and restricted access. Employees, however, tend to hold doors open for others and don't tend to check the photos on IDs when doing so. Dumpster areas are gated but unlocked, leaving them open to potential dumpster divers. Phone security is standard, allowing internal transfers and outgoing calls with blocked IDs. Remote access is through a VPN with SecureID, the use of which requires permission from a superior and inactive accounts are suspended within 30 days. Wireless access points in the buildings also fall under these restrictions.

As for hardware, remote drives are used, but employees are instructed not to store confidential information on the drives. Laptops are common, but only roughly 30% of users lock them with the provided cables. Shared drives on the internal network are protected by group permissions. On the system level, the company runs weekly virus scans. Security teams have reduced administrative rights on machines so employees can't install rogue programs. Password requirements are fairly standard, requiring a variety of characters, changed every few months.

Software comes standard for each machine. Screen savers are password protected, but not always locked. Most machines are open to Internet access, with the exception of some site blocking. Passwords can be saved in browsers, however. Email suffers from frequent server problems, webmail is not always secure, and IM use internally is rampant.

In the areas where social engineering prevention could be most useful, barely anything is done. When an employee is on the phone with Help Desk support, the employee's number comes up on phone but no standard authentication questions are asked by either the Help Desk staff or the employee being helped. CallerID spoofing would be a very simple way to get a password reset. Security