How Big Is My Coffee?
The human optic nerve carries a little less than 900Kbps from the eyes to the brain[1]. Necessarily this means that both the eyes and the brain perform some amazing shortcuts which we are only dimly beginning to understand, even now. For comparison, even the lowest data rate[2] of a DisplayPort video interface runs at 1.62Gbps – which is over 1800x as much data per unit time cf the optic nerve. The human visual system has evolved some truly remarkable capabilities, but the necessary shortcuts mean that it can be fooled. This is the basis of many optical illusions; by accident or prior knowledge, we discover types of image which confuse or mislead the viewer.
This photograph was mostly accidental. I took a boring photograph of my coffee to send to someone, and when I viewed it the coffee looked disproportionately large. A second photograph – this one – with a little deliberate composition, and some very deliberate cropping, enhanced the effect quite nicely. The staff could not work out why the coffee looks so big. Can you?
Social engineering, for nefarious purposes, is based on similar principles; smoke & mirrors, overloading limited brain processing power, and throwing in a good dose of urgency and panic. The latter part being necessary because when you look at this photograph, part of your brain will probably be telling you “something isn’t right here”.
Just like when someone is trying social engineering on you, part of your brain will probably be trying to warn you. The secret in both cases is to listen to this sense of unease and do something about it.
Sometimes this will involve asking difficult questions, and sometimes these questions will remove the concerns where the interaction is legitimate and non-malicious. But occasionally they highlight that things are not quite right. And you can defeat a social engineering attempt before it snares you.
The Art of Social Engineering is to get the result desired (by the attacker) before the target stops to think.
“Here Endeth The Lesson”
Footnotes & References
[1] Koch K, McLean J, Segev R, Freed MA, Berry MJ 2nd, Balasubramanian V, Sterling P. How much the eye tells the brain. Curr Biol. 2006 Jul 25;16(14):1428-34. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.056. PMID: 16860742; PMCID: PMC1564115.
[2] Single-lane at lowest data rate within the standard. At the other end of the scale, a 4-lane link running at the highest data rate within the standard clocks in at a whopping 77.37 Gbps
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