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)

Successful pretexting

Since pretexting is all about creating and living a lie, it is best if we take real examples of some scenarios where pretexting was successfully executed. As was stated earlier in the chapter, pretexting is not only used in social engineering and therefore you should not be surprised if an example is outside the context of a malicious attack. Some of the famous pretexting cases are explained further.

Living a lie, pretending to be someone else

HP information leak

In 2006, HP was battling with a problem of the leaking of classified and confidential information from the organization. It was suspected that the leaks came from high-ranking officials of the organization who sat in boardroom meetings. The...