Some in the security community demonstrated this with Robin Sage, circa 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage

Some in the security community demonstrated this with Robin Sage, circa 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage It introduces the idea of "transitive trust" where person A might not know person B but if the two have a bunch of contacts in common, the odds of A trusting B goes up. When there's a profile with tens or hundreds of shared connections, it looks real by all accounts. I wrote about this is an intel gathering/attack vector way back in the day but it's 100x better now because connecting is second nature and people trust more now: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/open-source-intelligence-linkedin https://caseysoftware.com/blog/open-source-intelligence-link...