Book Image

Learn Social Engineering

Book Image

Learn Social Engineering

Overview of this book

This book will provide you with a holistic understanding of social engineering. It will help you to avoid and combat social engineering attacks by giving you a detailed insight into how a social engineer operates. Learn Social Engineering starts by giving you a grounding in the different types of social engineering attacks,and the damages they cause. It then sets up the lab environment to use different toolS and then perform social engineering steps such as information gathering. The book covers topics from baiting, phishing, and spear phishing, to pretexting and scareware. By the end of the book, you will be in a position to protect yourself and your systems from social engineering threats and attacks. All in all, the book covers social engineering from A to Z , along with excerpts from many world wide known security experts.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Modes of thinking

To get into a target's brain, an attacker needs to understand the target's way of thinking fully. It is the most logical thing to do to avoid wasting effort and time trying to guess around with mind tricks which may fail and foil the whole attack. One does not need to be a psychologist to understand how people think; all that is necessary is some attentive listening and careful posing of questions to know this. The FBI understands this and in one of its bulletins, it explained that if one could confirm a nonverbal behavior to a client in the client's preferred way as well as match the client's speech volume and tone, the client would open up. What the bulletin was saying was that if one understood a client's mode of thinking and then matched it both verbally and nonverbally, the client would not be reluctant to reveal intimate details...