Engagement Insider Threat
Warning: Contains spoilers for the season 6, episode 5 “Tethics” of the show Silicon Valley which aired in 2019.
In “Tethics”, two managers of Pied Piper, Gilfoyle and Monica, are threatened by HR due to their low employee engagement scores — there’s a consensus among the employees that the two managers are jerks. They both promise to raise their scores, but stupidly promise to raise the scores from “hate” to “love” within a week. Faced with this impossible task, they hatch a plan to use social engineering to steal employee’s passwords and then, using the compromised employee’s accounts, modify the engagement scores to show that employees now love them. How realistic is this plan? How can we mitigate these kinds of attacks? Let’s use a threat modeling approach to answer both.