FA+
Shop
Social Engineering
16 years ago
How nice. Crimmah is a good time for social engineering tactics and German police is doing just that by demanding user-info of random people who supposedly make suicide threats on their user-profiles in Web 2.0 environments.
It's a splendid tactic because apparently there are enough people out there whose emotional stability really severely deteriorates with the coming of the holidays, and until you encounter the dark-green brigades up close, you don't really fathom the idea that a police commissioner on the phoneline is actually trying to bullshit you into "helping" them by skipping the necessary approval of a judge - a prerequisite to legally making website operating companies fork over user-info without them breaking the law.
Upon checking the profile of the supposed suicidal culprit, the operating company noticed, that there was no such thing as a suicide threat to be found and nothing on the profile would hint at such a deed in the future.
The operating company then informed the commissioner, that his claims were wrong, but in the mean time however, the police commissioner got a judge's approval.
{ And with the ongoing understaffing and all other sorts of budget cuts at the courts, it is really easy to get a judge's approval nowadays because judges can no longer cramp the time needed for assessing a situation in their work-schedule and just hand them out with a couple of minutes of shallow assessing. Another "benefit" of understaffing our courts is, that big business crooks can buy themselves free (dropping all charges in exchange) with a few millions after they have gotten away with stealing billions. }
Now the operating company had to hand out the user-info, even though the username was misspelled { the website's username format: |username||year of birth|. what on the judge's approval was written: |username||spacebar||year of birth| }.
The commissioner said, that it was just a typo of the judge which was caused by the judge's hastiness, but if the now acquired user-info is used by the police to break and enter into the home of this person under the pretense of preventing suicide, and this person is really far from committing suicide, the operating company will be in deep trouble.
It's a splendid tactic because apparently there are enough people out there whose emotional stability really severely deteriorates with the coming of the holidays, and until you encounter the dark-green brigades up close, you don't really fathom the idea that a police commissioner on the phoneline is actually trying to bullshit you into "helping" them by skipping the necessary approval of a judge - a prerequisite to legally making website operating companies fork over user-info without them breaking the law.
Upon checking the profile of the supposed suicidal culprit, the operating company noticed, that there was no such thing as a suicide threat to be found and nothing on the profile would hint at such a deed in the future.
The operating company then informed the commissioner, that his claims were wrong, but in the mean time however, the police commissioner got a judge's approval.
{ And with the ongoing understaffing and all other sorts of budget cuts at the courts, it is really easy to get a judge's approval nowadays because judges can no longer cramp the time needed for assessing a situation in their work-schedule and just hand them out with a couple of minutes of shallow assessing. Another "benefit" of understaffing our courts is, that big business crooks can buy themselves free (dropping all charges in exchange) with a few millions after they have gotten away with stealing billions. }
Now the operating company had to hand out the user-info, even though the username was misspelled { the website's username format: |username||year of birth|. what on the judge's approval was written: |username||spacebar||year of birth| }.
The commissioner said, that it was just a typo of the judge which was caused by the judge's hastiness, but if the now acquired user-info is used by the police to break and enter into the home of this person under the pretense of preventing suicide, and this person is really far from committing suicide, the operating company will be in deep trouble.
