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soCial engineering forensiCs
• Wikileaks is one example of a social engineering attack conducted by an insider
to obtain confidential and secret information. U.S. Army Private Bradley
Manning is accused of accessing internal sources of information and passing
that information to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. “He allegedly
managed to fool colleagues into thinking he was listening to music, rather
than steeling classified information …” (Goodchild, 2011a).
• Google Hack involved the breaching of Google customer information to access
Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. e Chinese social engi-
neers apparently accomplished their attack by “carrying out a length recon-
naissance of Google employees” (Goodchild, 2011a)