Influence Tactics in Marketing and Sales
Imagine this: It’s 9 o’clock at night, the house is quiet, and you’re in bed getting comfortable. Suddenly, you hear the friendly whistle of a twitter notification. You decide to check your phone “quickly” before going to sleep. An hour later, you’ve scrolled through all your socials and are seconds away from downloading a brain training app you saw on TikTok. Now, answer this: What made you…
Charity Fraud: How to Avoid Scams and Give Wisely
What do you think are some of the biggest causes for charity? Natural disaster relief, terrorist attack relief, world hunger, health care funding, and suicide prevention are just a few of the biggest subjects for charities. Unfortunately, these are also some of the largest areas for charity fraud. Since the beginning of COVID-19, cybersecurity firm “DomainTools” has flagged more than 100,000…
Cybersecurity First: #BeCyberSmart at Work and Home
As security professionals, we are conditioned by consistent exposure to adversarial simulation training. This immersive form of education allows us to develop and maintain a secure environment outside of the workplace, as well as in it. This begs the question, could a bank teller do the same if given some basic exposure to this training? What about a C-level executive? Approaching the question…
DEF CON 29: SEVillage Recap
The SEVillage was established back in 2010 at DEF CON 18. It has been the official home for all things social engineering for 12 years straight. Our flagship event, the SECTF, has been joined by other events over the years, such as the SECTF4Kids, and SECTF4Teens. SEVillage is also the home for all social engineering speeches at DEF CON.
Over the last two years, we have all adapted to the…
Christina Lekati
Christina Lekati is a psychologist, a social engineer and an open-source intelligence analyst.
She specializes in behavioral analysis and in intelligence collection and analysis through open source and human intelligence.
Christina has participated among other things in penetration tests, in trainings to companies and organizations, in vulnerability assessments, and in profiling and analysis…
The Power of a Good Pretext
You’ve been hired to access the data center of a highly secure facility. You spend hours researching the facilities security, combing their website, and searching through employees’ social media accounts. After some digging, you find that this company works with a specific corporate cleaning vendor on a regular basis. You decide to impersonate an employee of this vendor to get in the door. All…
Protecting Our Elderly from Scammers
Each year, millions of elderly people around the world fall victim to some type of financial fraud or confidence scheme. Throughout the scam, fraudsters will often build trust with their targets via computer, phone, and the mail. Once successful, scammers are likely to keep a scheme going because of the prospect of significant financial gain. According to the FBI, seniors are often targeted…
Tips to Keep Your Kids Safe Online This Summer
For the first 9 months of 2019, there were more than 11.2 million reports of internet crimes against children. However, that number soared to 18.4 million for the same period in 2020, when COVID-19 related quarantines and lockdowns were in full swing. Why? Predators knew that millions of kids were now at home. COVID-19 meant that most kids were distance learning, canceling their extracurricular…