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)

Tips

The tips for avoiding elicitation are as follows:

  • Elicitation is the art of getting answers without asking questions. In other words, elicitation is what you say and how you say it. Based on NSA, elicitation is the process of extracting information from something or someone, and what you say and how you say it will determine your success.
  • The weakest links in an information-security chain are the people and social networks.
  • Social interaction with humans is much easier to manipulate than complex IT systems.
  • Tools are an important aspect of social engineering, but they do not make the social engineer. A tool alone is useless; but the knowledge of how to leverage and utilize that tool is invaluable (Christopher Hadnagy).
  • The best counter measure against elicitation is to know what to say and how much you say. This also applies to social media websites; sharing is good but...