Skip to Main Content
Hacking: The Next Generation
book

Hacking: The Next Generation

by Nitesh Dhanjani, Billy Rios, Brett Hardin
August 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
298 pages
9h 5m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Hacking: The Next Generation

Hacking the Psyche

In addition to tangible information available on social networks, attackers can leverage the emotional feelings individuals express on social networking applications to perform social engineering attacks with the aim of influencing and manipulating the target individual.

Note

The We Feel Fine project is a good representation of how feelings from social applications can be captured and visualized. The We Feel Fine system searches social spaces online for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the sentence. Collected feelings are then displayed in various forms of visualization. Even though this project is not related to information security, it is a good example of the emerging techniques and importance of sentiment mining from social applications being discussed in this section. The project is located at http://www.wefeelfine.org/.

To illustrate how powerful sentiment analysis can be for an attacker, let’s assume a situation in which the attacker wants to perform sentiment analysis on a specific individual whom we will refer to as Jack Smith. We will then brainstorm how an attacker may use the results of the analysis to influence Jack.

Let’s assume that Jack has a Twitter account, a weblog on Blogger, and a Facebook account that he uses frequently. The first thing the attacker must do is stitch together Jack’s social presence online into one feed that she can analyze from the recent past to the present. To achieve ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Building a Modern Security Program

Building a Modern Security Program

Zane Lackey, Rebecca Huehls
Network Security Hacks

Network Security Hacks

Andrew Lockhart
Ransomware

Ransomware

Allan Liska, Timothy Gallo

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596806309Errata Page