Introduction

Pretexting involves the creation of a scenario purposefully meant to persuade or manipulate a target into yielding some information or complying with some other requests. A social engineer will assume a pretext that falls perfectly into the situation created and uses the pretext to get the target to comply with requests. Without the created scenario or the use of the pretext, the target would not comply. In social engineering, pretexting is mostly done to impersonate people working in certain roles on jobs that give them the privilege to order or request others to do certain things. For example, a tech support in an organization can ask a user to give out some information related to computers. It therefore may not come as a surprise when a user is told to give out his or her password for it to be changed. Even though the request for a password may appear to be strange...