Among Us has taught us all that our friends have the capability to turn themselves into horrible, backstabbing liars who would sacrifice trust and year-long friendships to beat us at a game. While Among Us remains an engaging platform to refine our lying skills (strict parents, I’m looking at you), there are people and organizations that use similar tactics to prey on vulnerable individuals.
Social engineering is how individuals/organizations deceive users into providing confidential information for fraudulent purposes. This includes phishing, pretexting, social media mining, quid-pro-quos, baiting and piggybacking/tailgating (yes, very cool names indeed).
Here’s your go-to guide on what these are, and how to eject the imposter in real life:
Pretexting: A method in which the attacker persuades the victim to give up confidential information or access to a system by creating an elaborate story explaining the situation. Pretexting is very distinguishable by how emotional it usually is. Among Us is fundamentally based around the concept of pretexting, as the impostors are trying to create stories to explain where they were and what they were doing on the map.
Quid-Pro-Quos: The infamous 50/50. When a player claims to have witnessed a murder firsthand, they report the same to their fellow crewmates who are faced with a difficult choice: did the reporter bluff or are they telling the truth? If caught red-handed blowing Blue’s head off, suggest a quid-pro-quo by voting out the reporter first and then yourself in the next round. You can now sabotage the map to throw players off. (Plus, get a kill or two in as well.)
Social Media Mining: This occurs when one goes through your social media to learn about you and create an attack completely personalised to you (yup, you’re that cared for!). You can do the same when playing with friends--use incidents from the past against them! Directly use it to undermine your friend’s legitimacy by questioning their character! If that’s not what Among Us is all about, then I don’t know what is.
The trick to ensuring that you are safe from social engineering attacks is to slow down. Too often in this hectic, digital world, we overlook the small things. Experts suggest that the key to avoiding being a victim is to take time to analyse and process the information that is being provided to you by the attacker. As any good impostor will tell you, the trick is to lie with complete confidence--but what they don’t mention is (and this is sound advice from a committed Among Us player) that the trick to being a good crewmate is to take your time in understanding and analysing the game.
So the next time you become the backstabbing liar that is an impostor, just remember it’s as easy as remembering the different types of social engineering and thinking back to a blog post you read on the TLP website that gave you, for some reason, these three very specific examples of how you can have a slightly better chance at winning a mobile game you’re playing instead of studying.
Or just have fun. Either works.
Written by Ved Pant
Designed by Anoushka Patel
Images taken from Lifestyle Asia and Bluestacks
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