Elicitation is one of the low risk and well-concealed social engineering techniques that has impressive results. There are some factors that make elicitation uniquely successful that have, over time, been engrained in humans. These are as follows:
- Desire of many people to be polite to strangers
- Desire from professionals to appear knowledgeable when questioned
- Desire of most people not to lie to people who appear to be genuinely concerned
- Willingness of many people to answer well-posed questions about themselves
Let's take a real-life example of how some of these factors play a part in normal conversations and how a social engineer can take advantage of them. Let's say that there is a corporate event where people get to interact with key members of staff in the organization. A social engineer could make his or her way to the Chief Finance Officer (CFO)...