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)

Information Gathering

A social engineering attack takes the path arrived at after the evaluation of information known about the target. Therefore, the tactics learned in the preceding chapters will be applied depending on the results of this chapter. However, information gathering is not as challenging as it used to be a few years ago when one would only get details about a target either directly from the target or from asking around. The internet, more specifically the use of social media, has simplified this stage with newer and faster techniques of data collection. In the process of data gathering, no piece of data is said to be irrelevant. Just a small bit of information, such as a target's favorite joint, might be sufficient to enable the social engineer to succeed at convincing the target to act in a certain way. It is important for a social engineer to know what type...