Technology News

**TimSchroeder** · 11-30-2006, 02:00 PM

darkreadingman writes, "A penetration tester tells how he broke into a bank's network dressed as a copier repairman. Some good lessons here — many companies spend millions on network security, but don't teach their employees how to challenge a stranger in the building. Social engineering at the company site can be one of the most difficult attacks to defend against." From the article: "Before departing scenes like these, we try to document the effort and provide proof of our success. I usually leave something behind and then contact the person who hired me and direct them to the mark. In this case I wrote his password on a ream of paper and tucked it under the machine."

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Read More About: First-Person Account of a Social Engineering Attack...

**vangogh** · 11-30-2006, 04:00 PM

The weakest link in security is always human beings. You can write an application to require a password and even require that password to be one that's hard to crack, but you can prevent someone from writing their username and password on a post it and sticking it on their monitor.