Hacking community and competitive intelligence

[Richard]

While attending Blackhat and Decon19 a few weeks ago, I discovered a whole subgroup of hackers that do social engineering. The first step in hacking is to profile your target, collect information about them. This community uses a lot of techniques that the competitive intelligence community does in collecting intelligence on competitors. For example they will scrape social web sites for profile information, they call it social engineering. There is one major difference however, they don't have a code of ethics. In discussions with some members of this sub community, I found that they have no problem dumpster diving for information. They have no problem hacking a personal account for more information, after all that's what they do- they are hackers. What I am finding as well is a growing set of samll business that offer their social engineering as a service, and the shocker is, they call themselves competitive intelligence professionals. I find this alarming, as I stated, they have no code of ethics to guide them. I fear a time when one of these businesses gets caught doing something by the FBI and that this era of terrorism, all competitive intelligence professionals will come under scrutiny, as we carry the same title, even thouhgh we are miles apart. how do we deal with this as a community? I can think that we make sure we hold fast to our ethics, we educate the business community and academia, as there are many out there'd that still don't understand what CI is and some think it is spying. Other suggestions?

[Trip Krant]

Are you sure that they are not offering social-engineering services for penetration testing?  Blackhat is an information security conference after all. 

I know www.social-engineer.org runs a big contest at Def Con; those guys are legitimate information security professionals who focus on the human attack vector (social engineering).

Pretty cool you went to those conferences, other than the social engineers how was it?

 

[Alex Ziaullah Mirza]

 

Well Mr. Richard, well wrote but you should also know about ethics of Competitive Intelligence and there are many institutions that educate with the certification of Ethical hacking means certified ethical hacking (CEH).

 

I have linked CEH and Ethics of Competitive Intelligence please read

[Sandro Tavares]

Don't worry, these guys are going to be overcomed very soon!!! ;)

 

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