Housing staff want a scripted browser to log into a sock puppet and send friend requests to fifty landlords. What should the analyst do?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A robot that knocks on fifty private doors is still pretexting. Sock puppets are for researcher OPSEC, not for automating friend requests. Stay with public posts and pages.
Full Explanation
Automation does not change the public-source rule. When housing staff want a scripted browser to log into a sock puppet and send friend requests to fifty landlords, the analyst should reject that interactive automation as pretexting for private or gated content and stay with public artifacts. Sock-puppet accounts exist to protect the researcher while viewing public pages, not to industrialize social engineering against landlords.
Approving the script because sock puppets make every private inbox fair game misunderstands OPSEC tooling as a warrant for private access. Increasing the friend-request batch to every landlord in the county amplifies the dragnet. Substituting wireless key recovery at landlord cafes swaps one out-of-scope attack class for another.
Exam caveat: public landlord listings, business pages, and openly visible posts remain collectible; the bright line is interactive requests that seek non-public relationships or content at scale.
Operational check: decline the friend-request bot in writing, collect public housing/landlord pages and posts with citations, and document that sock puppets will not be used to automate pretexting. Keep municipal wording calibrated to what public sources actually show, and record retrieval dates so peers can re-perform the work.