Rich Ronston of Deltek uses social media-sourced intelligence to understand new options and apply them to the business’s risk appetite. Photo courtesy of Lauran Cacciatori/Deltek
Picture this – in 20 minutes, one enterprising hacker at the 2012 Defcon conference in Las Vegas learned one Wal-Mart store’s physical logistics – from the janitorial contractor to where employees go to lunch – key details about the make and version numbers of the Wal-Mart manager’s PC, browser and anti-virus software, and got the manager to upload the address of an external website into his browser – no questions asked. The hacker, Shane MacDougall, had captured every data point in the convention’s annual “Capture the Flag” social engineering contest, and Wal-Mart was the victim. That’s social engineering.