In law enforcement, there are expert interrogators that undergo special training to learn how to draw the truth out of suspects. They learn the psychology of the human brain and how to unlock the brains of suspects and draw the truth out. Mind tricks are therefore, not a fantasy that can only be done in movies; they are real. It is the cues that people give that, if studied well, can make someone a mind reader. In this chapter, you will learn how attackers observe these cues and how they pose questions based on the behavior of a target to get them talking. Alongside this, you will learn how they build rapport with the target, how they gain trust, and how they build confidence with the target. These are tricks used even by salesmen to convince people into buying from them things that they would naturally not buy. Lastly, the chapter looks into the ultimate mind trick...

To get into a target's brain, an attacker needs to understand the target's way of thinking fully. It is the most logical thing to do to avoid wasting effort and time trying to guess around with mind tricks which may fail and foil the whole attack. One does not need to be a psychologist to understand how people think; all that is necessary is some attentive listening and careful posing of questions to know this. The FBI understands this and in one of its bulletins, it explained that if one could confirm a nonverbal behavior to a client in the client's preferred way as well as match the client's speech volume and tone, the client would open up. What the bulletin was saying was that if one understood a client's mode of thinking and then matched it both verbally and nonverbally, the client would not be reluctant to reveal intimate details...

As humans develop, they get acquainted with reading facial expressions. They can tell whenever the other person is happy, sad, disgusted, and so on just by looking at their faces. However, these expressions can also be faked and humans also grow up knowing how to subtly fake them. These expressions that are worn on the human face for a long time are called macroexpressions. Since they are not so involuntary, they can be faked and thus cannot be fully relied on. However, there are expressions called microexpressions. These are involuntary and cannot be faked or controlled. They are caused by emotions deep within when they trigger and cause unanticipated muscle twitches on the face. These expressions are short, do not even last a second, and are almost impossible to control. They manifest over the macroexpressions that one can wear for a long period to fool other...

NLP studies the way humans think and experience the environment surrounding them. It leads to the formation of models of how some principles work. However, it is controversial since it is admittedly not precise. The history of NLP can be tracked down to the 1970s. It was developed by Bandler and Grinder. They were the first researchers to come up with the code of NLP. They also developed a therapy model called the meta-model which they refined over the years for NLP.

When Bandler and Grinder came up with NLP, it was not as...

In the overview, it was said that the human brain can be hacked just like a computer. The previous sections have shown that emotions can be hacked in a target. This section discusses a much stronger hacking method of the human brain. Computer programs have been hacked with this technique where they are given larger sized inputs to hold in their buffers than they typically can. Buffers are memory storage areas used to hold certain data. When data supplied exceeds the limits, it causes an overflow. This overwhelms the programs causing errors and undesired behavior. This also facilitates a hacker to give some malicious commands when the computer programs are unable to control their own execution.

The tips for mind hacking are as follows:

• Learn how to ask the right questions
• Make sure your body language is in sync with your words
• Building rapport is not what you say; it's how you say it
• Rapport is established by matching and mirroring
• Humans are the weakest point of any organization; the more you understand humans, their behaviors, and their history, the better you can hack them

Mind tricks are the heart of a social engineering attack. They allow a social engineer to get into the target's brain and alter their decision making to follow a certain route. This chapter has gone through many ways in which a social engineer can get into a target's brain. The focus has been the subconscious brain, which plays a very important decision-making role in that it makes decisions before the conscious brain. Once some information is given to this part of the brain, it will decide in favor of it. The subconscious brain is, however, open to attacks. Emotions can be planted into it through microexpressions, thoughts can be sneaked into it, and it can suffer from buffer overflow. It is these vulnerabilities that allow social engineers to hack humans into deciding to make certain decisions. It has been discussed how all these things take time to practice...