Reverse Hacker’s Social Engineering

The  Unit has no competence in social engineering in the sense of the term used by hackers. Indeed, the Unit thinks that manipulating others so that they inadvertently betray secrets entrusted to them is destructive of trust between people, and therefore anti-social.

However, the existence of hackers attempting to “social engineer” unsuspecting guardians of passwords, etc., to disclose them through messages conveyed over the internet offers an opportunity which fascinates some Unit members. These members think that it should be possible to seed vulnerable parts of the web with learning systems posing as human guardians of the codes which hackers seek to learn. These learning systems would have the objective of learning the hackers´ locations and identities. These learning systems would be given different approaches to try. Some at least would use the tricks of “social engineering” as taught in courses for hackers.

As these Unit Members see it, this experiment could establish the existence of computer systems capable of passing the Turing test (i.e. proving indistinguishable from real people so far as written communication goes)  in the real world, and do so completely ethically. Incidentally, they might prove almost as efficacious in eliminating their objective as reverse temporal engineering was in the story(1).  This second possible result should enable the experiment to be generously funded.

Of course, the Unit may be behind the times once again. The experiment may well be under way.

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Should you wish to comment, an email to solon@usesolon.org may draw a response.

 (1) Mostly Harmless, D. Adams.