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)

Principles and planning of pretexting

Pretexting, just like any other skill, has certain principles that achieve good results when used well. These principles are what social engineers put to use every time they have to resort to pretexting, and they always pay off. Let us take a look at some of them:

The principles of Pretexting summarized

Doing research

The success of a pretext can be directly attributed to the amount of time spent doing researching on it. The more a social engineer is informed about a pretext, the higher the chances are that it will work. The reverse is also true because the less a social engineer knows about a pretext, the higher the chances of mistakes and ultimately a failure of the pretext. A big chunk...