New Social Engineering Event to Train Business Pros on Human Hacking

Chris Hadnagy, founder and chief human hacker for the firm that created the famed Social Engineering Capture the Flag contest at DEF CON, next month will kick off his first social engineering event geared for business, technology, security, and psychology professionals.

Social-Engineer LLC's new Human Hacking Conference spun out of the firm's wildly popular CTF and its training services, according to Hadnagy, and will cover techniques in human deception, body language analysis, cognitive agility, intelligence research, and best practices in security.

"There is an appetite for a more professional side of social engineering — not so much where the bad guys wearing dark hoodies" are going after the good guys, but understanding how to read and apply those skills in non-security jobs, he says. 

The event — February 20–22 in Orlando, Fla. — will feature various workshops led by experts in mental health, method acting, leadership skills, open-source intelligence, nueroscience, deception, trust, and body language and nonverbal communication. There's even a training session by Ian Rowland, aka "The Mind Man," on cold reading and how to apply some of its communications techniques to business and sales. 

Hadnagy says so far the event has attracted human resources, sales teams, red teams, and white-hat hackers, who want to understand security issues on a broader scale. "It's a wide genre, which was kind of my goal," he says.

There won't be a DEF CON-style SE CTF, but Social-Engineer does plan to conduct a live demonstration of vishing. 

Read more about the Human Hacking Conference here. 

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