Social engineering is a technique that relies heavily on humans for its success. In its simplest form, it makes use of non-technical ways to circumvent the security of the system. The success of an attack relies heavily on the information that the attacker gathers about the victim.
The various resources that assist in information gathering are:
Social networking websites
Online forums
Company websites
Interacting with the victim
Impersonation is the most common and effective form of a social engineering attack. Here, the attacker pretends to be someone else and tries to gain the trust of the victim. The attacker performs reconnaissance and identifies valuable information related to the victim, which helps during an interaction with the victim.
An example of impersonation is described as follows:
The attacker identifies a victim and gathers information about them using publicly available resources.
The attacker identifies the information that the victim might have published...