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)

Organizational employees

At times, social engineering attacks are not wedged against individuals, they are focused on an organization. With competition in some markets being stiff, some organizations are switching to malicious ways to get a competitive edge. One of these ways is illegally obtaining sensitive information about their competitors. Social engineers are therefore at times hired by organizations to collect trade secrets, blueprints, confidential documents, internal communications, and even consumer data from competitors. As we shall see in the following section, there has been a wide use of social engineering for corporate espionage where social engineers are paid to target a specific organization. There are some employees that are therefore prime targets when this is to be done. These are as follows:

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