Lightning Talk 1: From Breaking In to Breaking Through: the applicability of skills from social engineering to teaching security behaviours

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Presented at SecuriTayDundee 2019 by

Rose Lawrence

What isn’t there to love about talking your way into places you’re not allowed, free stuff, or any number of other things that leave you with epic stories? We glorify and revel in impressive and amusing social engineering hijinks, which is great until the point where we need to get our colleagues to be better about security behaviours and the first “soft skills" that we think of using in the context of security are about deception and manipulation. Social engineering can be powerful for getting people to do things for you, but helping people to be better with security practices requires a different approach to be effective. This talk will cover some basics tips from teaching and behaviour change interventions, which skills developed in the context of social engineering have some crossover, and pitfalls with using social engineering tactics on your coworkers.