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

Social engineers have a particular taste for the victims that they target. Targets are chosen after an evaluation of what can be stolen from them and how easily this can be done. This chapter has gone through quite a number of targets that are commonly preferred by social engineers due to the roles they play, the wealth they own, or the ease by which they can be scammed. The chapter first looked at banks and highlighted the loopholes that can be exploited. Just to recap, an example has been given of a professional bank robber highlighting the avenues that they exploit to steal data from within these institutions. The chapter also looked at the cracks present in old organizations that make them easy targets for social engineers. Special attention has been given to three types of organizational employees that are prime targets for social engineers-IT personnel, finance department...