Chris Sacca is my best-friend (not really)

(Although, because I'm about to follow up this post with second citing Sacca, you might think (I think) so.)

Poor Sacca, head of special intiatives at Google, has been suffering from an army of company reps. seeking to garner VC (venture capitalist) funding by feigning his close, personal vote of confidence. But as he says, 'the valley is small'---smaller than these fakers think. That smart devil Sacca caught on to these ruses and posted about the sheer brashness of these posers and their failed assumption.

All that's interesting to me because right now I'm reading a book by a guru of social engineering. Kevin Mitnick is a mastermind hacker who, after a stint in the cell, has since evolved into an above-board security expert and author.
His first book, The Art of Deception, actually implements some of the very techniques of social engineers, you learn as you read on: The Scare tactic, the Helping hand tactic, and whatnot. The scare is the threat of social engineers themselves taking advantage of you, your business, "maybe they already have" dot, dot, dot. hah, he's pretty brilliant.

Nevertheless, while bedazzled with the creativity of these deft deceptors, I couldn't help of thinking of the huge risk gaps in their ploys. Specifically, core social engineering tools seem either useless or overly risky in predating the small company or community. Just as Sacca expressed. And if Silicon Valley is smaller than one might think, imagine what a small company is like.

The Soci-Engineering tricks are elegant when employed on vast bureaucracies where a little charm and bawlderdash get you far if you've done sufficient background research. But in a small company, you walk down the hall, or lean over the desk, and just ask for verification. In fact, I just witnessed just this sort of outing of a pretender in my own office, where an over-ambitious (but harmless) party tried to fake relationships within the company to leverage authority for help ("the big boss" ruse Mitnick applies). It failed miserably because there's too much communication in a smaller group---fewer institutional assumptions (which might also imply less laziness in thinking outside one's own role and within the larger framework of the business model).