This.
Bit specifically tricking people into gaining access to accounts.
Another one for the IT version.
The system works in physical security, too: it’s amazing and kind of scary how far you can get into all kinds of locations by just looking like you know where you’re going. Add a clipboard, maybe a hard hat, and you’re golden. You don’t even need to con a specific person: you con anybody and everybody who sees you, via body language or at most a prop.
Manipulation, con men. By manipulation I was thinking of something broader than conning individuals. It’s something practised by governments, political parties or social workers in an attempt to alter societal attitudes and opinions. It might be an advertising campaign aimed at getting people to do something healthy or something more sinister as when in Rwanda a hate media campaign was used to get people to kill their neighbours.
Definitely the IT hacking context. I haven’t heard it used as an alt-right term.
I’m a sociology major and haven’t ever come across the term in any of the research, so my first guess is that it’s some kind of BS “theory” cooked up to convince people the gummint is BAD!
My first thought is that the speaker/writer is a butt-hurt rightie.
Zobbo, welcome to the Dope. What do YOU think of?
Hearing the two words in isolation, all I think is, “Huh? No idea what that means, but I bet if I encountered the term in context I could easily figure out what was meant by it.”
(my bold)
That sentence doesn’t seem to make sense.
I think of it as the government or some other authority trying to encourage a certain behavior. To me, it’s also neutral, because I see it as a way to achieve an outcome, where the outcome is bad/good/neutral. I first heard of it in Tax Law class to describe why certain tax deductions are given.
Sorry, to me the idea of “the government improving peoples’ lives” is the bullshit here.
I had never heard of social engineering being used in the IT sense as described here. I always think “manipulation” when I hear it.
The IT sense is exactly that - manipulation.
It’s a very common term for hacking that involves manipulating people into, for example, giving you their password versus decrypting the password in a database.
The term has been around in the more general political science usage since at least 1894. It was originally a positive idea, and gained its negative connotation after misuse of the concepts. Social engineering is still in wide use today - tax deductions for a mortgage and child tax credits are social engineering attempts to encourage home ownership and raising children. Those could be either positive or negative depending on your views.
“Hi, I’m from the IT department. We’ve recently detected some suspicious activity on your account, and we wanted to verify that you haven’t been hacked. We’ll just need to ask you a few questions; this will only take a couple of minutes. Now, what was your password, again?”
At least, that’s the way it would typically go, but it could also encompass threats, bribery, seduction, or any other way of attacking the human element in any security system. Or the “carry a clipboard and look like you know what you’re doing” technique Nava describes.
Some argument with a far-right guy who was going on about how the liberals were using social engineering for this and that, with the obvious intent that “social engineering” was insidious liberal witch-magic. I casually pointed out that the first 8+ years of school history classes are social engineering in the form of Modern American Mythology about how noble-spirited and divinely gifted all of our nation’s founders were so we grow up as patriotically minded citizens who shiver at the thought of “But would the Founders say…?” and that, of course, was completely different and didn’t count.
I think of architecture and design meant to encourage specific social behaviors and outcomes. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
Designing shared spaces to maximize positivity in social interactions.
zobbo, that is a really strange term. Where did you come across it? Is it a term you encountered in college? If so, it would help to know what school you went to, because I am very curious as to whether it is a local phrase or a more generally-known phrase. What year were you in school? That might help us narrow down when the term first started appearing.
lol@Bob - Classic, I like it !
BTW guys, these responses have been great. It’s amazing how some people perceive it as conman on a phone, others as an architectural term, others as an IT term and some as government conspiracy term.
Its amazing how one term has evoking so many means to different sets of people.
I’m only familiar with the term in the context of network or system penetration - gaining access by manipulating a human using ‘soft’ skills rather than technical ones.
This, but broader. Use of social convention like the habit of holding doors, answering questions asked with seeming authority, and so forth to get passwords, restricted space access, or any sort of information.
Same. At least, this is what I thought of the first time I heard it, which confused me because the context had nothing to do with this. Eventually I worked it out as a bit of tech jargon that referred to something that was neither social nor engineering.
“I’m gonna have to drop this class…”