If you are someone like me, your first instinct is to trust others;
your second instinct is to want to trust others; and your otherwise instinct is
to resent not being able to trust when you discover that your trust has been betrayed. Yes, I have found that most humans including myself
have an innate subconscious desire to trust.
We take chances and give the benefit of the doubt in the spur of the
moment, only to discover that those ‘inspiring’ our trust are the least
trustworthy. This discovery makes us
feel powerless and betrayed. It makes us
feel guilty and inadequate for not engaging our instincts and taking control of
the situation or redirecting the conversation into a neutral state which would
allow us to safely escape the predicament.
If you are very much like me, you do not like confrontations
or engaging in negative discourse of any kind.
Hence, we fall victims of ‘Social
Engineering’.
I often wonder why I have this dire need to share
indiscriminately. It feels at times as
if these individuals intently push me to reveal information they have no
business asking of me. I tell myself
over and over, “I trust with my eyes open”, only to discover that when push comes
to shove, I give into my innate desire to bond, to trust, to embrace others.
So what exactly is ‘Social Engineering’ and who are these
social engineers? At what point does this
behavior become intrusive and at what point does the actor of this behavior can be defined as a
perpetrator?
Well ‘social engineering’ is a term coined primarily by
Security Professionals when identifying Identity thieves; when in fact, it is a
social and behavioral anthropology term governed by anthropomorphic attributions.
Social engineering has a wide behavioral
spectrum of vectors and variables stemming from the innate benign to the most egregious
intellectual, emotional, and/or physical of assaults on our usually unsuspecting
psychic. All species in the animal
kingdom are susceptible to this behavior as both actors and subjects simultaneously.
In other words, at one end of this spectrum, we find
ourselves in the primordial state; i.e., at birth, the beginning of a
relationship, a first encounter (be it live or in cyber space), a situation we happened
to find ourselves in, and so on...
We may be entering this state as a blank slate (as presumed
of the state at birth, for example), a neutral state (as when unsuspecting),
predisposed (as when we are being targeted and subjected by experts in any
field; i.e., advertisers, marketers, and as in the case of Security professionals,
perpetrators and opportunists),
An example of the benign is the social interaction between
parents and newborn (assuming healthy individuals) learning and adapting to
each other’s personalities; or siblings learning how to play or interact with
each other while adapting to each other’s temperament driven role-playing,
characteristically speaking.
When in a neutral and/or predisposed state, individuals are
in a highly vulnerable position. This can
be the vector driven by experts such as educators, marketers, advertisers, drug
pushers (be it illicit or legal), and/or Identity Thieves and other criminal
types.
Early childhood Educators, for example, are potent
members of a social structure who have the power to type cast our young in
so many facets and with each facet driving its own spectrum of behavioral outcomes;
thus impacting on the innate personality of the child. Any of these outcomes can predispose the
individual throughout his/her life to be either indiscriminately trusting to a
fault or intuitively cautious when trusting.
No matter what the disposition is at any given time if you
are like me, your first instinct is to trust, to want to trust, and you regret
not being able to when you realized that you do not live in a trustworthy
world.
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If you should like to partake in further round table
discussions on the subject of social engineering types and outcomes, please
feel free to contact me.
Virginia Benedict is available to speak on this subject matter as it relates to technology as social
tools, information security and social behavior.
As always, you are welcome to email me your questions and feedback as
well.
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