Maxie Reynold's Art Of Attack

Information Processing; Observation and Thinking Techniques

Information Processing

Processing information to weaponize and leverage it is a necessary cognitive skill to get into the attacker’s mindset. As an Ethical Hacker (EA) you need to use the information to its greatest potential. Information collection is the first step in your attacker’s journey. Information processing is next followed by employing the best methods or approaches to utilize information. You can collect information through these four ways - obtaining by observing, theorizing, and inferring. Information processing comes after the information is collected. During the processing, you sieve information into three channels.

• Recon: Information that is relative to your target and their environs

• Pretext: Information that you can directly weaponize to keep your intents safe even when you are a threat.

• Disregard: Information that is not useful to the course in pursuit. You can discard them.

Observation

Observation is a mental process that can be active(induced) or passive(spontaneous). Passive observation is an unconscious and haphazard mental process where an attacker rarely takes cognizance of events that happens but could bring it up to relate when the mind is walking through some past experiences. Active observation is consciousness that comes with the curiosity to know and get information in a critical manner.

Through observation, intuition, heuristics, rationale, and reasoning is born. The attacker’s mindset relies upon this lens of observation to be able to get accurate and well-processed information and a land higher likelihood of meeting the objective.

Brain vs Observation

Even though most part of the observation happens in the brain, the brain is structured to pick what you feel is what you need without collecting every detail unless you ask it. As an attacker, you need to build your brain towards all that is important through understanding how the brain and its senses work. Knowing your brain feeds only on what you expose it to and remembers what it feels is important. Observation helps us to elevate a high level of attention to everything you are woke to as an attacker so you would not miss what is most important. Observation is a skill set attackers should work towards building.

• Walking and Talking - When you are walking, you should be able to listen to other people talk while they are walking. Trying to walk past people or pretend to be doing something else but you are actually onto their conversation to get some information.

• Listening - Listening to the surrounding where you are. Observing some triggers, changes, and lookouts where you can engage and pointing out where your target enables you to play up your listening skills • Looking - Scanning every detail to spot a flaw.

• Surveying – taking a mental picture of what you want to get into, the likely things you may see, or the scene you may encounter.

Observation and Heuristics

Heuristics are using basic logic to arrive at conclusion, even though some heuristics results may be false because the conclusion when experimented maybe show that heuristics is wrong, heuristic is a good skill to be learned. Heuristics determine what could be in your environment however, you should not overlook the essence of logic and reasoning.

Observation and intuition

Intuition is a mental ability to know and understand a context without a piece of initial evidence or reasoning.

10 Commandments that Navarro gives for observing people that will bring out the most information.

Commandment 1 Be a good observer of the environment.

Commandment2 Observing in context is key to understanding nonverbal behavior.

Commandment3 Learn to recognize and decode nonverbal behavior that is universal.

Commandment 4 Learn to recognize and decode the idiosyncratic nonverbal behaviors.

Commandment 5 When you interact with others, try to establish their baseline behavior.

Commandment 6 Always try to watch people for multiple tells – behaviors that occur in clusters or in succession.

Commandment 7 It is important to look for changes in a person’s behavior that can signal changes in thoughts, emotions, interests, or intent.

Commandment 8 Learning to detect false or misleading non-verbal signals is also critical.

Commandment 9 Knowing how to distinguish between comfort and discomfort will help you focus on the most behaviors for decoding nonverbal communications.

Commandment 10 When observing others, be subtle about it.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to use your sense of reasoning and logic in arriving at a judgment. Critical thinking is much required in your Attacker’s Mindset. The author says that information is the lifeblood of every attack. employing reasoning and logic in the processing of information help the attacker to make the most of the information in his arsenal. Critical thinking goes hand in hand with mental agility. Quoting the author “Being able to think through information and taking it in order to analyze it is a skill in which the process is invisible, but for which the outcome is astoundingly valuable and often seen by everyone. This is critical thinking: an invisible process with a detectable outcome.”

Critical thinking is very instrumental to problem-solving. It helps you to analyze, evaluate and implement. It also helps in the model formation and decision-making in relation to the attacker’s mindset.