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)

Learning to identify social engineering attacks

In order for one to be able to prevent and mitigate against social engineering attacks, one needs to be able to identify them. Understanding the patterns and progress of a social engineering attempt is essential. The use of some expressions, body language, and expressions during conversations should be able to trigger an alarm if they are intended to make a user fall victim to social engineering. Since attackers spend time to train on how to get their targets, it is the responsibility of the targets to create a security awareness culture. Companies should make sure that their employees have this culture instilled in them.

Organizational employees have laxity towards security since they know that if data is stolen by hackers, they are not the direct victims. There is also the false belief that it is upon the IT department to put in...