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Comment by baystep | Hacker News Reader

What about the "I've lost that email account, can I switch it to another to recover my account?" case. Or the "I'm the legal guardian of this person and need the account control switched to my personal email", or in the business world "this employee doesn't work here anymore and as administrator I would like the account transferred to me" cases. Locking customer support systems down tightly has it's own pros/cons.

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I suppose I was more specific than I really should have been. More broadly, I'm trying to say that you have control over the tools and processes followed by your customer service. They can be used to combat social engineering.

For something as important as the credentials for a bitcoin exchange account, as Alex gave as his example, there should be policies specifying the reasons why account credentials can be changed and what evidence must be presented to do so. Front-line customer service reps shouldn't be flying by the seat of their pants when making difficult decisions with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.

What happens when someone calls the CS person and tells them to type in their email address instead of copy pasting it or whatever. If there are any bugs at all in the CS software then it won’t be hard for the CS person to believe there is a bug they need to work around similar to the other bugs that are already in their dashboard.

The point of social engineering attacks is that they’re innocuous requests that don’t raise suspicion, and are hard to train people against.

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