Targeting and Recon

Social engineering, unlike many methods of attacking people, tends to be target-specific. A social engineer wisely chooses who to target in order to create the perfect social engineering attack and has several contingencies if some of the steps in the attack fail. The choice of who to attack is hardly ever a lucky guess; the attack begins with a lot of information gathering to find the target. Due to the nature of this type of an attack, it would be foolish of an attacker to rely on a lucky guess. It may turn out that the target picked has nothing to offer and thus all the efforts and resources used in the whole attack go to waste. A social engineering attack has to be tailored just to the specific target or else it will not work. A successful attack on a certain target will also not necessarily work on another due to the level of specificity that has to be...