A great example of Social Engineering is an article written by Maniac_Dan
inside the magazine 2600, Vol 19: Fall 2002, titled "Outsmarting
Blockbuster." Let's say you have a $25 late fee at your local
Blockbuster video rental store and you wanted to get the late fee cleared from
your account. Sounds easy huh? The first sequence of events to come to mind
would most likely be, "All I got to do is break inside the building
after hours and hack the computers. Wait, He just told me I could get them to
do what I wanted." With 2 months of waiting around and a simple phone
call you can have your account cleared. It is very simple in fact; all customer
accounts are stored locally, which means the store that you signed your account
with is the only store that has your account information. We are going to refer
to this store as store #1. Store #2 which can be any store you want that is not
local and it's going to be the store you're pretending to call
from. The main object is to make store #1 believe that you are from store #2
and to get store #1 to remove the fees from your account by believing that you
are paying for them at store #2. Local stores tend to know each other so the
social engineer has to pretend to be calling for a store far away. To get the
store number either buy something and look on the receipt or to call store #2
and to say "I'm filling out a job application. What's your
store number?" Your account number is the last 5 numbers on the back of
the card. Once you have gathered this information call store #1 and tell them
you are from store #2 and that the customer's (your) account is frozen
(after 2 months the account will freeze). They will ask for the account number
and the customer's name. They will tell you that the account for [your
name] has a late fee of $25. You ask your wall if they would like to pay the
$25 here and then you tell store #1 that the customer would like to pay the fee
here. They will ask for your store number, once you give it to them they will
say good bye. If they ask you to do anything all you have to do is tell them
that your new and that you'll have the manger call them back when she
gets out of the bath room.(2600 23)