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)

Summary

This short chapter has discussed a very powerful skill used in social engineering to bring targets out and put them in a position from where they can be exploited. It has looked at how one can strike up a conversation with a total stranger and maintain it. Even more importantly, it has looked at how a social engineer can preload the target with some information so as to affect the target's response. Lastly, the chapter has looked into a number of tactics that can be employed in order to successfully perform elicitation. Just to mention a few, the chapter has looked at how intelligent questions, assumptive questions, and bracketing can be used to elicit a target to give out some information with accuracy. The stroking of egos and flattering of targets has also been discussed as ways to get a target to overshare some details that are seemingly sensitive. Lastly, alcohol...