Good Social Engineering Tricks

[thedotmaster]

Me and some friends are into urban exploration and the other day we were hanging round this industrial estate near the River Mersey, North West UK (I'm on the Wirral side, if anyone knows the area).
We first approached a random industrial yard/warehouse place with a large SLR camera around my neck. Some builders stopped me and my friend and we asked if it'd be okay to look around, to do some photography for our art project on industrial settings (bullsh*t of course). He said he'd have to ask the boss, so we made excuses "ah it's alright mate", but then asked if there was anywhere similar nearby. He mentioned a shutdown oil refinery (at which point we were thinking "alright!") nearby so we went to check it out.
We approached it and as we were getting near a large barrier came down and a security guard came to the door of his little hut thing. We explained our 'situation' but he said he couldn't let us in due to health and safety. Oh well. It was a nice try.
We then went on to Tesco, where we messed around with the laptops until we found the admin account. The password suggestion was "store number".
So we went and approached an assistant and asked them if they had a copy of the store number around as we were applying for a job and the online form required the store ID. She kindly wrote it down for us on a piece of paper. We kindly left good-ol'-4chan up on those laptops.
Whilst the day wasn't overly successful, it was my first attempt at social engineering and the camera idea will surely work at some point. Worth a try anyway.

Anyone else got any interesting social engineering stories, tricks or tips?

[tgoe]

Years ago I wrote a bot for Virtual Places (vpchat.com) when it was affiliated with the (then) major portal Excite.com

Excite had a number of secret questions for "remembering" an account password... one of which was "What is your pet's name?". So the bot sat in the VP "pets" chatroom cheerily asking for pet names at random times and recording username/petname combinations... which turned out to be just as good as username/password combinations on Excite

...maybe not social engeering per se, but I think that any system that still relies on secret questions/answers is susceptible to something like it.

[TheMindRapist]

Good story, would read again.
10/10

[godofcereal]

Of all the sites you pick 4chan, imagine how many lives you have destroid... 10/10

[thedotmaster]

Of all the sites you pick 4chan, imagine how many lives you have destroid... 10/10

Their fault. They should have a filtering system, or even block their access to the internet.
Plus there are worse Chans I could have stuck them on (though that also probably would have ended up with me being arrested).

Oh and er, I don't condone any of that kinda thing.. er.. yeah.

[godofcereal]

Their fault. They should have a filtering system, or even block their access to the internet.

Would you really expect a store to do that? They try to give the people a full experience of it, then you come along and have some fun playing with them

[thedotmaster]

We weren't meant to have access to the computers themselves, there was meant to be a slideshow thing playing. We turned it off then on again

[boza111]

hey thanks interesting read! haha nice one at getting the wifi pass

[tarantulas]

neat. makes me wish i lived somewhere remotely "urban"

[insomaniacal]

That story sounds extremely similar to one that I remember reading in some old Text file that was about social engineering... The bit about finding old factories and claiming to be a photographer at least. It might even have been on Totse...

Anyway, good job at getting the password. Shame on the store for setting such a lame password, and then even giving the hint. I haven't done any things in stores for awhile... should really get on it. I mean, we all know walmart deserves it xD