[kaycebasques]

I’m referring to the explanation of what seems to be called cookie stuffing (based off other comments in this thread). Most of you probably already know about this, but it was news to me and very satisfying to learn why those shitty coupon sites exist.

The main idea of the post doesn’t seem to be related to social engineering, though. Sorry for the confusion, I should have clarified.

[ryandrake]

It seems less social engineering and more taking advantage of search engine stupidity (Domain Authority) to do run or the mill black hat SEO. I mean seriously, I would have thought a multi-billion dollar search engine would be more sophisticated than “durr, the domain has amazonaws in it, therefore it must be legit!”

[kaycebasques]

I'm just going off of this Wikipedia definition of social engineering:

> Social engineering, in the context of information security, refers to psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.

The psychological manipulation in this case is getting people to click a button because they think that it will show them a coupon (and therefore save money), when in reality it does no such thing and instead puts a cookie in their browser.

[scrollaway]

By your version of the definition, asking your friend to pass the butter is social engineering.

The definition you copied is vague but includes the key phrase "in the context of information security". The coupon code sites are just scamming people by wasting their time (and primarily, scamming the retailers). It's essentially just fraud.

If this were in an infosec context (clicking something that pretends to be legitimate in order to gain some benefit), it'd be closer to phishing.

[kaycebasques]

I don't understand the comparison to "asking your friend to pass the butter" but it doesn't seem like a fair comparison. I explained pretty clearly how I thought the cookie stuffing idea mapped to the Wikipedia definition and it seems like a reasonable mistake to make. But I'll take your word for it that the definition I used only applies to infosec.

[pixl97]

Eh, I would think of it more like renaming yourself 'bill gates', then people who are not your friends will still pass you the butter because they think you are important. At least in the context of the article.