Ever gotten an email from a so-called Nigerian prince in hot water, asking you to wire him a small sum to get him out trouble?
Ever fall for it?
If so, you've been a victim of social engineering.
Patrick Laverty, co-founder of the Layer 8 Conference (which just had its inaugural run at Salve Regina in June), explained further.
"The idea that social engineering is all about is that it's trying to get people to perform an actions that's not in their best interest, and they may or may not be aware that it's happening," Laverty said.
Other examples: a representative from "Windows Support" calling someone out of the blue for a user's credentials and using that information to pillage, a "higher up" from a bank's tech department calling a branch manager who get's the manager's computer credentials, etc. etc. The phenomenon is so widespread that companies often hire white-hat hackers to test their own defenses.
Laverty, who is a penetration tester at Rapid7 in Boston and has a history of organizing conferences, felt like social engineering was rife for exploration via an event.
"There are generalist security conferences all over the place," he said. "People are looking for something specific. Network security [was trendy] for a long, long time, [then] application security ... the next big thing will be social engineering. [I thought] this would probably be a fun thing to be to focus on and get a jump on."
Layer 8 Conference was born, and it's the first-ever of its kind in New England. The one-day event included two tracks for participants, with panelists, discussions and a headline presentation from professional penetration tester Joshua Crumbaugh dubbed, "How to Rob a Bank Over the Phone."
The event drew 150 attendees from all over the country.
"That's pretty incredible for a first-time conference," Laverty said.
He added that together with co-organizer Lea Snyder, the plan is to run the conference again in 2019. And while there's hope to expand the event into a two-day affair (especially since some attendees expressed serious interest in a longer program), Laverty said the immediate plan is to move slowly and steadily, with new and interesting concepts to explore in the conference's content.
"We're hoping to really expand this to other people, like journalists and sales people," Laverty said. "[These people are] able to work with others and get information and build up that trust and rapport. [Journalists know] there’s got to be a different way to ask the same question to get the information that they need, to get the information probably without the person knowing that they’re getting the information."
