Several of my students participated in a Social Engineering DNS Registration project.
The idea was to hack one anothers' Web pages by hijacking DNS registration, the way Google Malaysia, AVG, and Avira were.
One student so far succeeded, and here he explains how he did it.
1. I performed a Who-Is query on www.target.com. ( I learned the target's email, name ,phone number and home address.)
2. With that information I attempted to hack into the targets Yahoo email account through the automated system and failed miserably.
3. I Google searched the target's name. I found the target's month and year of birth. I also found out that the phone number he's using for the website is his cell phone.
4. I called Yahoo customer service and failed again.
5. I attempted to hack in through the automated "Forgot Password?" process and failed.
6. I found the targets Facebook page. He had hid his day of birth but his friends all wished him a happy birthday on one day ( I inferred that this must be the day.)
7. With the Facebook page information , I called into Yahoo customer service again and got them to reset his password.
8. When I logged into his email I found the website logon information. With the logon information I was able to get in.
What I learned:
Be very careful with your personal information when creating a website. If the DNS register offers WhoIs Anonymity, I've come to the conclusion of paying for it. For example, I'm having a very hard time getting the email for the other target because he paid for the extra WhoIs anonymity.
I also plan on registering the website and email with separate information; so that if one is compromised it won't give the attacker everything. I'm also going to start creating extremely strong security questions such as "What was your favorite cartoon as a kid?" and implementing some questions to have a random alpha-numeric string answers with hardcopy answers in secure locations.
I'm also going to advise that any person in charge of web administration have their social media completely locked down to avoid sensitive information disclosures. Finally, I'd look into investing in a private email server because I found Yahoo's security practices to be appallingly bad.