I feel that this chapter pointed out something very important in terms of information security. The example of the father refusing to believe that his son could retrieve his credit card number provides some insight as to why these social engineering scams are so dangerous. The father in the story had so much confidence that the company would not reveal his credit card number; he was even willing to bet money on it! I think this example shows the presence of a generational gap in terms of security beliefs. I feel that older Americans (not in the IT field) are so trusting in these companies and their “secure” technologies that they put themselves at risk.
Further, most older people are more vulnerable to these attacks due to the fact they don’t realize what someone could do with this type of information. For example my dad knows how to turn on his computer and look at web pages and that is it. It would be easy for someone to trick him at work by throwing out some jargon and he would have no idea it was a scam. In other areas he would be impossible to trick (he’s a lawyer) it’s just that computers are a new thing to him and unlike our generation he was not brought up with it. I feel that our generation will be a little more savvy to these types of threats.
2 comments:
I did feel bad for the father in this chapter. I have also mentioned in other posts how our elderly (or just older generations) are so much more likely to be attacked because of their lack of knowledge. And his son didn't have to be such a butt head about it.
It's interesting that you mentioned the generational gap. I recall one time when I was trying to switch cell phone service providers and needed my father's SSN to carry my number over from his account to my own. I called my dad and asked him for his SSN and he was very hesitant to give it to me. He thought that they should only need the last 4 digits. It took me about 5 minutes to convince him to give it to me. He was all up in arms about giving his SSN and it didn't seem out of the ordinary at all to me. I guess we're opposite what one would normally expect to see with the generational gap.
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