Week 2 - Discussion

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Sociology

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Feb 20, 2024

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After reading the article " Don't Include Social Engineering in Penetration Tests ," discuss whether social engineering should be included as part of a penetration test. Knowing that the human is the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, is it ethical as part of the pen test to engage in behavior that the author describes as a "grey area: compromising staff members' personal devices or personal email accounts (as opposed to work accounts); breaking into office buildings to steal equipment or plant network monitoring devices; compromising social media accounts to perform recon; etc."? (Kaplan-Moss, 2017) Review several of your fellow learners' posts and respond to at least two of your peers by end of Day 7 of the week. In your response to your classmates' posts:  Do you agree with your fellow learners' assessments of social engineering as part of penetration testing?  Try to expand on your rationale by asking your classmates questions and provide additional resources and evidence to support your claims and to extend their thoughts on their point of view. References Kaplan-Moss, J. (2017, June 27). Don't include social engineering in penetration tests [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://jacobian.org/2017/jun/27/social-engineering-pentests/ I think you must include some kind of social engineering into the penetrations test. If you don’t, then you’re not accurately assessing the network and leaving a blind spot. It doesn’t matter how secure a network is if the people using it don’t understand how to detect and avoid instances of social engineering. That being said, the pentesters mentioned in the article were not acting ethically. There has to be a line there. There’s no way that it’s ethical to break into an employee’s personal devices or accounts. You want to make sure that malicious actors can’t get into the network, not actually become one. One of the articles I came across mentioned a standard of “do no harm” (Goodchild, 2013) for penetration testers. I think that makes a lot of sense as a way to approach how you apply social engineering to penetration tests. Sources: Goodchild, J. (2013, April 23). Social engineering in penetration tests: 6 tips for ethical (and legal) use . https://www.csoonline.com/article/2133330/social-engineering-in-penetration-tests-6-tips-for-ethical- and-legal-use.html. Penetration Testers . Security Through Education. https://www.social-engineer.org/framework/general- discussion/categories-social-engineers/penetration-testers/.

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