Social Engineering at PHDays 2012

This year at PHDays 2012 , the tradition of organizing intellectual contests was continued. The forum guests were awaited by a rich competition program - PHDays CTF , Online HackQuest , HashRunner , Big $ $ h and a host of other competitions in which hackers demonstrated their skills of hacking and protecting various systems.

However, without a doubt one of the most interesting, original and fun competitions was the Big Shot competition, during which participants had to demonstrate their skills as social engineers.

Each participant was offered a photograph of a person by which he could not be unequivocally identified, as well as a set of theses that characterize this person. The pictured in the picture was present at the forum, and the contestants had to determine his personality and perform a series of specified actions (for example, “shoot out” his business card or take a photo with him).
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The competition was held during the two days of the forum, and the results were summed up at the end of the second day. The winner was the participant who completed the most tasks in the shortest time.

After the start of the Digital October Halls competition, positive guys and girls began to run, asking the right people for the description to do something.

Sometimes it was relatively easy to identify the “victim” (as was the case with the technical director of Positive Technologies Sergey Gordeichik).



But in other cases, to complete the task, the participants had to actively use the deduction method.



One and a half dozen brave souls took part in the competition, who had to use all their charm and advanced NLP skills to learn intimate details of the lives of the target people (for example, which person the SSH client uses or what day they were born) or perform, according to the task received , something completely crazy (for example, sticking a sticker on the back of the "victim").

All participants of the competition received memorable gifts and a positive charge, and we are already thinking about how to make the competition more interesting next year.