Social Engineering or Stalker 2.0
Hey there,
I had some friends complaining the last days, that they are not able to see an (ex-)friends profile details any more, because they quit their friendship in some social network. I’m a friendly person, and this might be help for stalkers or other freaks, but I started thinking about a generic approach to get those “hidden” information.
Technical solutions are neither platform independant nor realizable by the “normal” people, not related to advanced hacking. So I began to plan a social engineering approach. Your could easily write a person, and think about some excuse to make a contact and after a few messages, maybe earlier you could send a friendship invitation and hope the target person accepts it. Depending on how actively the person uses the social network, this could take some days, and maybe its the better thing to do for a long-term “monitoring”. But depending on the case, you need to create and maintain a fake account, until it looks realistic enough to contact someone.
I wanted to make the progress more efficient and I thought about the information you can use, because of the fact its a “social” network where the person is expected to share certain information. In the case of studivz you can mostly view the following information:
- First name (Mostly a part of the second name)
- former school
- age or year of graduation
In this case most of the people in studivz have the so called general qualification for university entrance which meens they have (until last year) attended school 13 years. Most of the schools publish photos of the graduated class on their website close-captioned with the names of the people you see. There are alot of alternative sources for those photos, like newspapers archives, related profiles to this person and other social networks, which you can use to enumerate people out of the target persons former life.
With this list, you can start looking for a person out of this class, who has no profile in this social network, and mostly there are a few, and start to use the hole in the network and all the really existing relations to get your perfect fake profile running. Some skills with photoshop and you can make out of the yearbook photo a profile picture everybody knows and start contacting all the friends on the list. At that size of people you will have fast alot of friends, mostly the first few after some hours. Now the time has come to send a friendship invitation to the target person. No excuses, not a single message needed, and most likely he/she will accept the invitation to grow his/her network.
Of cause there are some cases in which you wont have the luck, maybe because the person is closely in contact to the person you impersonate or maybe they were some kind of hating each other. But there should be a few other “friends” on the list you could try out, and dont forget to get the other fake profile you created on your friends list, so the work is not for the trash. (Only if it is not burned already)
Sooner or later, fake profiles, which are created that closely in an existing and real social relation might not last that long like one created and introduced in a longer time. So which of both approaches you choose depends on the situation. And look at it the other way, maybe there is already some account like that in you friendslist?
