We have presented some basic steps that are required to initiate a social engineering attack against your target. This is not the only method, or even the one that is the most likely to succeed, but it should give you an idea of what social engineering entails. Intelligence-gathering, identifying vulnerable points, planning the attack, and execution are the common steps taken by social engineers to successfully divulge and acquire target information or access:
- Intelligence-gathering: There are many techniques to determine the most alluring target for your penetration test. This can be done by harvesting corporate email addresses across the web using advanced search engine tools; collecting personal information about people working for the target organization through online social networks; identifying third-party software packages used by the target organization...