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)

Tools to enhance pretexts

Finally, a pretext can be made to be convincing using a number of tools. The most important one is a business card. People generally tend to be trusting of business cards and believe that a person is all that a business card says. Therefore, if the pretext involves claiming to be from a certain computer repair company, making a business card with your name neatly written alongside the company name and logo will save you some hassle. Business cards can also be handed out to targets that begin to doubt a pretext and want to be given time to make up their minds. Another tool that drastically improves the chances of success in a pretexting attack is a uniform. If, for example, an attacker wants to dumpster dive an organization, he may just go to the guards, explain that he is from a garbage collection company, and he wants to remove the bin liners before...