Influence and decision-making

- Before diving into social engineering, it's important to understand how influence and decision making factor into our lives. Imagine a kid who loves playing video games. This kid's mother keeps the PlayStation in her room during the week, so the kid focuses on schoolwork instead of playing Dream Light Valley until 3 a.m. When Saturday comes around, the kid wakes up early in the morning, rushes to complete their chores, scribble some stuff on their homework sheets, and makes their mother breakfast. Then they tell her that they did all their chores and their homework. She's so proud of the kid that she doesn't even blink when they ask her if they can play video games. She never checked if the kid had done all of their chores or if their homework was correct. All that's important is that it appeared the kid did what they were supposed to do. Yes, kids are social engineers. They use the knowledge they have of their parents, unknowingly or knowingly, to get them to do something they may not not have wanted to do. I'm sure that many of you have done something similar. Social engineers may seem like con artists or sociopaths, but the truth is that all of us have done some social engineering at some point in life. It's not always malicious or criminal. So how do malicious people take advantage of human behavior and what causes people to fall for it? There are lots of studies done on human behavior and why humans do what they do. However, when it comes to social engineering, it all seems to boil down to decision making and influence. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, influence means the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command. In our scenario, the kid influences the mom and the mom influences the kid. The kid influenced the mom into allowing them to play their video games, and the mother influenced the kid to do the thing that she values before playtime. In the book Fishing Dark Waters, the authors wrote, "Decision making is a sum of a number of factors including our perceptions and emotions." The decisions we make depend on what's happening in the present and what we've experienced in the past. It also depends on our beliefs and how we feel about the context provided. To illustrate this, the mother of the kid likes a clean house, values education, and doing an act of service for her is a way to soften her up. Given these factors, she may make a decision that generally swings towards a favorable result. So as you can see, influence plays a role in creating an environment or circumstance that causes a person to make a decision that is favorable to the person of influence. In the next video, we will discuss phishing and see how influence and decision making can play a role in it.