Professional networking sites are unwittingly providing hackers with the possible means to carry out sophisticated social engineering scams, a UK security consultancy warns.

SecureTest was able to produce a comprehensive personal profile of an internal employee in a short time using data from social and professional networking sites such as Ryze, LinkedIn, and Ecademy. Combining the technique with careful web searching and cross referencing yielded information that would be difficult to obtain using traditional phone-based social engineering techniques.

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