I was browsing my google reader feed today and came across this frightening little link: New way of social engineering on IRC

From that headline it might sound like some sort of vague web 3.0 social networking thing. Until you realize that social engineering is actually a hacker euphemism that’s been around since before there was a web 1.0. It basically means lying, what security experts call exploiting a vulnerability between the chair and the keyboard. Why spend the time and effort hacking into a system to plant a virus, when you can just sweet talk some idiot who works there into installing it for you? A lot of the biggest “hacker” attacks of the past few years have actually been social engineering attack, scammers with quick tongues exploiting the credulous rather than computer code.

And here we have a new way of automating it. Continue reading