Social Engineering Attacks and Counterintelligence Case Study

Social Engineering Attacks and Counterintelligence - Case Study Example Social engineering is seen to mostly rely on people’s innate inability to effectively keep up with the current culture that heavily relies on information technology, this essentially refers to the fact that most persons happen to not be well aware of the actual value of the information that they happen to possess and are therefore rather careless about its protection (Rouse, 2006). It is not uncommon for most social engineers to try and search dumpsters in a bid to try and obtain valuable information, engage in the memorizing of access codes by essentially looking over someone else’s shoulder in a technique that is commonly referred to as shoulder surfing, or taking full advantage of people’s natural inclination to constantly choose passwords that happen to be meaningful to them and can be easily guessed (Rouse, 2006). Most Security experts have taken to proposing that as the modern day culture continues to become ever more dependent on information, it is increas ingly evident that social engineering will ultimately remain as the greatest threat to any possible security system. What is Counterintelligence? According to Hawkins (1997), counterintelligence has actually been around for as long as espionage has been. Traditionally, counterintelligence has mainly been thought of only in the context of solely attempting to counter human espionage efforts. However, modern counterintelligence is designed to be a multi-disciplinary effort and can be defined as being the detection and effective neutralization of the activities and opportunities of a given competitor with the sole objective of gaining proprietary advantage over a certain given organization by using a raft of unethical and illegal methods. Competitors can be identified as being anything from a local or foreign business enterprise or individual to a foreign government. Hawkins further notes that, over the past ten years, counterintelligence has been redefined by the United States federal government to counter more than the threat from human intelligence to now include imagery and signal intelligence collection. The Potential Implications of Social Engineering and Counter Intelligence in respect to the Leaked Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diary It is probable that social engineering was primarily used to trick Bradley Manning who is the 22 year old U.S Army Intelligence analysis suspected of leaking an approximated over 700,000 secret government documents to the Wikileaks website. As such, it is seen that Manning may have been tricked into going beyond his already established user rights into divulging this information. The Wikileaks website owner Julian Assange is however seen to refuse to divulge exactly who it was that provided him with the leaked documents. To this end, it is seen that the United States counterintelligence efforts happened to experience a serious lapse in that such important and classified information could be copied and sent to an outside source unofficially. As a result of social engineering and inefficient counterintelligence efforts, the United States military is now seen to be exposed as the Pentagon claims that it is aware that a number of various terrorist organizations are currently actively engaged in mining the leaked Afghan War Diary documents in an effort to try and obtain