Oli's Blog (True or Flase)

A couple classes ago we learned about social engineering. Before this class whenever I thought about hackers and people gaining information was by a hacker getting into my computer and breaking through a security system. However that is not always the case, the easiest way to get past "security" is sometimes by deceiving the person using it. Social engineering uses psychological manipulation to persuade people to release information, give access, send money, etc. The topic that stuck with me the most in the class is that with social intelligence it is not just about creating this elaborate lie but just creating a situation that a victim believes is real. This made me think about the Salem Witch Hysteria presentation, could what happened in Salem be compared to social engineering? It is a situation that people believe to be real, if you are a woman then you are a witch, if you do not have kids then you are a witch... obviously they were not trying to hack into any systems or g...

Last class, we learned about phishing. After being able to present our phishing topic, I went down a rabbit hole and found a lot more valuable information that I wanted to reflect on. As we know, phishing is a cyberattack where someone pretends to be a trustworthy person or entity to trick you into giving them something valuable like password, money, personal data, etc. Phishing is a form of social engineering which means that the attacker targets the person rather than simply trying to hack the technology. There are many different types of phishing - each targeting something different. I think the last bit of information we shared on phishing and how you can be aware of it is the most important. STOP, THINK, VERIFY. These are three crucial steps to not be a threat to a phishing scam.  So what is new in phishing? We briefly touched on this, but AI-generated phishing is allowing attackers to use AI to quickly create personalized messages without making spelling mistakes or awkward w...

Last week in class I learned that propaganda is not just about giving people information, it is about controlling the audience views on reality. When Professor Enos did the card trick, we all believed that we choose the card 5 hearts but in reality that is not what happened. He lead us to that number and that suit, but we believed that we chose it. Propaganda controls situations and time is a factor within it because some times you might feel like you do not have a choice but in reality propaganda is making us feel like we are independently making a choice even though we are being influences by a technique. We also discusses fallacies and how people will believe something because it is what they want to be true and not because there is enough evidence to support it, just like the Mia vs. Fang example. Propagandist also try to hide these techniques so no one can used then back towards them, so once a technique is exposed it can change peoples opinions.  Professor Enos taught us that...