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

This chapter has gone through several ways by which a social engineer can collect information about a target, be it an individual or an organization. The chapter has broken down the information-gathering techniques into two categories—technical and non-technical.

This chapter has dug deep into the ways in which social engineers obtain information about their targets. One particular tool of importance is the Pipl website that has indexed almost half of the earth's population and is serving as a rich source of information for social engineers. We have looked at eight other technical information-gathering techniques that are mediated by technological tools and explained how the data collection occurs. We also visited the physical and rather traditional golden ways of collecting information about targets that are still useful today. Then we discussed five of them...