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)

Summary

Mind tricks are the heart of a social engineering attack. They allow a social engineer to get into the target's brain and alter their decision making to follow a certain route. This chapter has gone through many ways in which a social engineer can get into a target's brain. The focus has been the subconscious brain, which plays a very important decision-making role in that it makes decisions before the conscious brain. Once some information is given to this part of the brain, it will decide in favor of it. The subconscious brain is, however, open to attacks. Emotions can be planted into it through microexpressions, thoughts can be sneaked into it, and it can suffer from buffer overflow. It is these vulnerabilities that allow social engineers to hack humans into deciding to make certain decisions. It has been discussed how all these things take time to practice...