If you have a pesky business competitor who’s doing better than you are, and you’d like to sneak into their computer network to get some ideas on how to better them, don’t bother with all that geeky hacking and cracking.  

Just load up on chocolate bars and you’re good to go.  

As unbelievable as it sounds, a survey of 300 office workers and IT professionals in the UK showed that most of them will gladly cough up their computer passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar.  

The researchers approached people at London train stations and a technology trade show, gave them a free chocolate bar, and asked them if they knew what the most common password was, and then what their password was.  At that point, 40 percent of the commuters and 22 percent of the so-called IT pros revealed their password.  If they didn’t tell it right away, some more probing was done – is it based on a kid’s name, or a pet, or a football team?  That prompted another 42 percent of computer specialists and 22 percent of commuters to hand it over.

When you combine this with all the passwords written on Post-It^TM notes and stuck to monitors – which you’ll find if you walk into just about any office – you can understand why network security people look so cranky most of the time.

Read more at IT Week.  

It's called "Social Engineering" and is was pioneered by infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick. He stole top secret IT information from Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems simply by calling up the company and asking for it by posing as an employee with top clearance. It won him five years in jail.

Quoted from Holden_West

It won him five years in jail.

That's not all it won him -- he's now a computer security consultant, and, from what I can determine, doing rather well.

I once interviewed one of his clients, and asked her why she would put the security of her business in the hands of a convicted criminal.  She replied, "Well, if you want to protect the henhouse against the foxes, don't ask a hen -- ask a fox."

Crime pays, hey?  =)