Social Engineering during the COVID pandemic

Speaker

Ari Trachtenberg

Abstract

Social engineering is typically the first stage and most important in any significant cyberattack, whether it be pretexting and elicitation or rapport-builiding, influence, manipulation and framing. This talk will cover some of the standard social engineering approaches from the literature, and consider how they were used during the COVID pandemic, by both government and tech sector agents, to shift the prevalent social and medical cultures in the purveyance of a public health narrative.