Post: #1

Original Article: Dating Coach shows how to get classified military information - The Verge

Today I stumbled upon this article about how a "dating coach" (wtf is that? LOL) was able to get information from contractors and other people with security clearance.

He create a fake identity posing as an attractive girl seeking career advice and another identity as a recruiter on LinkedIn. From there he was able to contact people or have people contact him and get OpSec (operational security) information from them.

Quote:"I’m actually going to be in Afghanistan," he’d write. "We should meet face-to-face." Without thinking, the target would volunteer his or her location — a breach of basic operations security.

Harbinger carefully crafted each Facebook message, appealing to engineer friends or Wikipedia in order to keep up with all the jargon. Innocent questions such as, "What kind of things should I talk about in my interview?" yielded the location of testing facilities, what projects were being worked on at what facilities, how many people were working on these projects, and even the project budgets. Bizarre statements like, "I really don’t like working with Chinese people," revealed which projects were staffed with mostly Americans and which departments employed foreigners.

Harbinger stopped short of pushing for classified information, he said, but he got close enough to prove how easy it would be to extract very sensitive intel if he’d kept probing. Still, he was able to reset one target’s passwords and access a PayPal account, bank account, credit card statement, and cell phone bill. He learned that one target was in debt, which is grounds for losing a security clearance and therefore a job. (The logic is that debt makes an employee vulnerable to bribes.)

This is something worrisome as the old rule still works, poosy works in mysterious ways.

Finally, the last part of the story is ironic....

Quote:Harbinger has used his skill in social engineering to overcome his awkwardness around girls, score a job as a Wall Street lawyer, and build a business around teaching men how to talk to women. (He does not advocate lying to women and does not consider himself a pick-up artist, he says; "those guys are weirdos.")

He considers PUAs to be weirdos, yet he "overcame his awkwardness around girls", is a dating coach, and creates fake identities as a women....that's even more damn weird.

Post: #2

dude should apply for an NSA job. That is 99% of what they do. Only they don't need any passowrds.

Post: #3

Guy's just being smart about his business saying PUAs are weird or media would toast him.

Post: #4

You know the guys he was hustling were bragging to their friends about the hot blonde chick they were talking to online.

I imagine the conversation went something like, "Oh man, you guys should see this chick who's been emailing me. Total dime, and she's even interested in my boring job. Top that motherfuckers!"