A little over one month ago on the Social Engineer Podcast we launched the first ever social engineering based poll. During the podcast Dave said that he believed some social engineer does NOT involve deception where as Chris thought social engineering always does.

Dave feels that there are certain forms of social engineering that can be employed completely with full honesty and still be classified as social engineering. Where as Chris feels that all forms of social engineering (not aspects of social engineering such as doctors, lawyers, etc) involved some form of deception.

To clarify, we have interviewed many people that aspects of SE, like Mischke and Ellen Langer, but in themselves they are not social engineers. Of course their jobs involved not using deception many times, but we were arguing if there are any methods in actual social engineering that do or do not involved social engineering.

Since we could not come to a solid agreement on our own we opened it up to you, the public. The response has been amazing. Below are the results of the poll.

First, the questions we are where:
1) Does SE always use Deception (YES) or are there forms of SE that do not (NO)?
2) We asked for the country of the survey taker
3) The gender of the survey taker
4) What the survey taker does for a living
5) The #1 was no, to give an example of a form of SE without deception

After compiling the hundreds and hundreds of submissions here is what we have:

When we broke down the percentage of those who replied by gender.

No great shocker there we figured we would see more guys responding here than girls.  Then we broke it down by geographical region:

We see a decent selection of people from all over the world.

But what about the actual question.  Did most people side with Dave and think you can be an SE without deceiving or most agree with me and think SE always involves some form of deception….

(drum roll please)

Sorry Dave but I guess you will have to try again in another poll.  But as I expected SE will involved deception is a fact for over 60% of the technical people out there.

Find this interesting?

Submit your ideas for another poll to contribute -@- social-engineer.org

Dave Kennedy deception gender manipulation Mischke poll SE awareness