What is Dumpster Diving?

Dumper Diving, is a technique where a person searches through someone else’s trash, a company’s trash, a business in a local area, or industrial parks trash, to find any useful information that will help them to carry out an attack on the network. The main areas that the person searches is for little notes with passwords, cards that have any useful computer logs, papers with information on the company’s network, and also access codes that are discarded. This all can be used because, once a password is discarded a computer will tell the person that the password is not in service anymore, and that it has to be changed, and this will help the attacker to retrieve useful information, it’s like the first step to accessing the network. Other useful information like phone numbers to customers, administrators, charts, calendars with information written on them that can be used with social engineering. Social Engineering, is where the attacker poses as a company owner or a friend of the customer or administrator, to ask where they are, there access code, or to pose as an office worker that is sick. With this info the attacker will be able to access servers when the owner of the information isn’t present, and 9 times out of 10, the information is still useful, they just didn’t take the information seriously as they needed to. To stop dumpster divers, a company or business should make a trash disposal policy where all paper and cards plastic cards and more are shredded prior to being disposed of; this will stop the attacker from getting hold of useful information that will allow him to carry out an attack on the network.

References

What is dumpster diving? - Definition from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved August 4, 2015, from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/dumpster-diving

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Created on August 04, 2015 by Lionel Sharpe || Professor Eric Rivers at 12:56 AM