View and vote on the article here: Outside the Box: Social Engineering Part 1
Outside the Box: Social Engineering Part 1| Category | | | Summary | This is the first part of the Outside the Box series on Social Engineering. Outside the Box appears every Friday.
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| | Body | The average American is not aware of all the resources that go into the social engineering of their lives. For those of you familiar with the term ?social engineering?, you are either just familiar with its use as a cracking term as a way to get someone to reveal information that you want, such as their password, credit card number, or other personal details. Those uses of social engineering are illegal for those uses, except when companies do it. The act of polling could be considered voluntary social engineering of an entire demographic. But that is not what I am referring to. There is another type of social engineering that most of you have not even heard of. It is not used to ?grep a brain? (for those of you not familiar with Unix or ?grepping', it's a command to filter/search very large files [usually] for information), but in the cases we will discuss here, it is used to make changes to your way of thinking or to influence you through known demographical habits.
What I will not go into much depth here is the morality of this practice. The main point of here is to inform you about various methods and tactics so that you will become more aware of the world around you. Once you become familiar with them, you will feel like you are the Matrix. You will see the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth, or to show you half truths.
Let's start with this article. It is social engineered to you. In my college career, I was taught how to do this. Composition and Public Speaking courses teach me how to write articles, papers, and speeches that capture the reader/listener's attention, hold on to it, and persuade them to my way of thinking. I am employing phrasing right now on you to persuade you that my information is accurate, that I am a credible person, and that you should act on this information. Now you can see why we won't go much into the morality of the practice. It's not that I feel guilty for doing this, but that I feel it is a good practice when used properly. If writers didn't know how to capture attention, you would never have heard of a guy named Stephen King.
Now, let's look even deeper. Look at the site around this article, which I'm sure you are now familiar with. There are graphics that draw your eye, colors around certain areas on the page, special positioning of the menu, etc? This very site is designed to keep your attention. This is referred to as the ?stickiness? of a site. The longer a site can keep you on it, the more successful it is at its task. Shopping sites especially want you to stay. Here, the goal is education and interaction. This type of SE, as I will refer to it now, is in all honesty a bit more sinister than the simple writing of an article. So let's look at it from my point of view as someone out to steal your attention!
My job here is to design a site that brings in people in, keeps them here, and brings them back as much as possible. What you are not aware of is the sheer amount of thinking that goes into this process. Look at you're Address Bar on your browser. What's the base URL say?
http://www.zzine.org
Why does it say that? The letter Z is cool. This is a known fact that certain letters and numbers get certain reactions. 0,1,3,7, D, E, I, J, L, M, O, P, Q, S, V, X, Y, Z? While all of these may not seem cool, and no real scientific effort was put into typing those, I can say from experience that you will find at least some of them ?appealing characters.? There is scientific evidence about letter use, and such evidence usually revolve around how people choose passwords. Capitalization is also a factor. This is not something drawn from L33t Sp34k, but from many main stream products as well. Apple is a company really in tune with this concept. It's not I-Mac, it's iMac. It's not OS x, it's OS X.
At this very site, a lot of thinking went into the domain. Nay, a lot of thinking went into our name, even before considering a domain. The name has gone through many different considerations. CyberArmy (which itself is an example? notice that its not Cyberarmy, but with a capital A, so that the abbreviation of CA feels more natural) was once part of the name. When we still just ran a little news site on the CyberArmy site, we considered CyberArmy Magazine, CA-ZINE, Zeb-Zine, Zeb Magazine, Zebulun Magazine, etc? If you look at our site, we use the term Zebulun Magazine. We did not start using this because it was appealing in itself, but because it is the ?long version? of our real name, zZine. zZine? that's appealing. 2 Z's, a capitalization on the second one? it gives the word itself some strange and mysterious power, and that's exactly what we wanted. The ?long version,? Zebulun Magazine, is just to explain what the name stands for, and how it was derived. The ?z? = Zebulun and the ?Zine? = Magazine. This name was then translated into our URL. And while we would have liked a .com, it was taken, and we have found .org to be very appealing, and also gains us a feeling of more credibility that .com's seem to have lost. I've even been told by an Indiana University Professor of English that a .org as a research source holds more credibility than a .com, and almost as much as a .edu or a .gov. After explaining to them that I owned a .org, which isn't hard to obtain, and didn't necessarily have to post accurate data, that person immediately crossed .org off their list of ?Academic sites.? But it is a good example of the power within a name.
As you can see up to this point, everything we decide goes through a filter of ?what will draw people?. ?zZine? is ?kewl?. If you're a script kiddie hacker, you'll recognize the l33tn3$$ of the name. We intentionally left out any ?hacking/hacker? reference, and our ?i? is not a 1. When a security professional or other serious person visits the site, they will not feel they have come to a pirate site or some ?how to hack hotmail? site. This is why our headers and title use the long version, Zebulun Magazine. I could go further into why we and CyberArmy use the name Zebulun, but it's the same basic principle of looking cool and not bringing the negative stigmas with it. Lastly, the name is short, easy to remember, and unique. This goes a long way for websites. This is why Yahoo! and eBay (notice their capitalization in comparison to ours and Apple's, and see the marketing at work) are easy names to remember, compared to poorer attempts to the likes of Altavista. A is simply not a ?cool? letter, and it's harder to spell.
I haven't even gone into site designs yet, or even non-internet uses. You should already be thinking to yourself, ?If this much goes into a name, what in God's name goes into other things?!?? Let me ask you a question? why are menus usually on the top and the left? The majority of professional websites do this. Look at a Geocities personal page and you won't always find these menu bars there, if at all. The reason is that the average person doesn't know the power that these hold. Americans read from left to right, top to bottom. That's why the menus are at the left and top, because that's the first place English readers look. In Japanese, a right/top configuration would probably look better. So why do we also put a menu bar on the right at zZine? As you read your eyes are drawn to the right? and we don't want your attention wandering. When you reach the end, we're snatching your attention to other site features and eye candy. We're attempting to draw you further into the site. Everywhere you go, there are links further in. The further you go in, the longer you stay.
In a perfect world, people would judge a website by the value of its information. I'm not so na?ve to believe that design doesn't have as much or more to do with a visitor staying and coming back to zZine than the information we offer. That's why we highlight features, menus, and scrutinize over the placement of our content. We're playing on how the human mind works and our own demographic's likes and dislikes. We're not a shopping site, but a lot of marketing goes into our design. Great pains are taken to make us appear as professional as possible. We could do our job with 4 pages: index, download file listing page, forum page, login page, but that is nowhere near as professional as what you see now. All of the site's info is designed to draw your attention. It's really a huge illusion. I'm not saying that our design isn't functional. But, the ease of use is not inherent. The purpose is to capture you as a faithful visitor. All of its ?functions? appeal to the human sense of greed, which is why we offer you features that aren't necessary, but which you instinctively find attractive? and it's part smoke and mirrors, making you feel like you are in a cathedral of knowledge, not an outhouse.
So, I've admitted to you that everything we do is to manipulate you in some way. But, other organizations and companies are doing the same thing. Either you play the game, or you get off the playing field. If we bucked the trends, you would find this site ?ugly and unappealing? even when the exact same content is presented to you. But, this type of SE is relatively benign. The design of a website to get you to stay, or buy a product is just a fact of marketing. Even communist countries engage in it, marketing their own ideologies. This is where it gets more dangerous. But it's not only hostile governments that are dangerous to your way of thinking.
In the next part of this series (Friday, June 21), we will explore the SE tactics of retail stores. |
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: Goliath)
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