Beware the Fake Interview

As Internet attacks become more sophisticated, beware the fake interview. At the DEF CON conference in August, organizers held a social engineering contest revealing just how creative hackers have become. One of the tricks used was to call up an employee of a rival company and claim you have a better a job for them. A mock interview would then be set up where the intruder would have questions with the sole intent of extracting information about their employer.

It's amazing how much information can be ascertained this way as people are particularly vulnerable when they are interviewing for a job. In fact it would be fairly simple for any kind of online attacker to find you, meet with you and extract sensitive personal information from you.

Meanwhile, monster.com disabled a feature that in the past would allow you to block certain companies from seeing your resume. This was mainly done so your current employer couldn't see you were looking for a job, but it also might have helped guard against the aforementioned kind of attacks. The feature would automatically turn your resume to private, but this is no longer an option. I've done some preliminary searching, and I've yet to come across any sort of backlash from angry monster.com users. You never know how people will react when it comes to their privacy, but it appears this one has slipped under the radar.

Regardless if you get an interview for a job make sure you know who you are interviewing with, and try to meet at the interviewee's office, not a neutral site.