Best Social Engineers

Notable social engineers

California police departments investigating red light violations

More than 30 California police departments mail out fake red light camera "tickets," also called "Snitch Tickets," in an effort to bluff registered owners into revealing the identity of the person who was driving the vehicle at the time of the alleged violation. Because these "tickets" have not been filed at court, they carry no legal weight and (in the US) the registered owner has the right to remain silent and is under no obligation to respond in any manner. In California, a genuine ticket will bear the name and address of the local branch of the Superior Court and direct the recipient to contact that Court, while a fake "ticket" generated by the police will not.^{[13][14][15][16]}

Kevin Mitnick

Reformed computer criminal and later security consultant Kevin Mitnick points out that it is much easier to trick someone into giving a password for a system than to spend the effort to crack into the system.^[17]

Badir Brothers

Brothers Ramy, Muzher, and Shadde Badir—all of whom were blind from birth—managed to set up an extensive phone and computer fraud scheme in Israel in the 1990s using social engineering, voice impersonation, and Braille-display computers.^[18]

Archangel

The white hat hacker, computer security consultant, and writer for Phrack Magazine, Archangel (nicknamed "The Greatest Social Engineer of All Time") has demonstrated social engineering techniques to gain everything from passwords to pizza to automobiles to airline tickets.^{[19][20][21][22][23]}

Steve Stasiukonis

Security Consultant for Secure Network Technologies. Inventor of the USB thumb drive test where USB sticks contained exploits to test if employees would run them from within their business environments. This attack is now one of the most popular social engineering techniques in existence and is used to test the human element of security around the world.

JB Snyder

Principal Consultant for Bancsec, Inc., and one of the world's top experts in banking cybersecurity, developed and proved in over 50 U.S. bank locations "the most efficient social engineering attack in history." This attack vector, primarily utilizing email, allows a social engineer to make unauthenticated, unauthorized, large cash withdrawals from bank branches ^[24] with an extraordinarily high success rate (over 90%) while enjoying low probabilities of immediate detection or subsequent incarceration. Among his other successful bank social engineering test accomplishments is wire transfer through a combination of emails and telephone pretexting.

Mike Ridpath

Security consultant for IOActive, published author, and speaker. Emphasizes techniques and tactics for social engineering cold calling. Became notable after his talks where he would play recorded calls and explain his thought process on what he was doing to get passwords through the phone.^[25][26][27]

Others

Other social engineers include Frank Abagnale, David Bannon, Peter Foster, Mehdi Zilaoui, and Steven Jay Russell.