Ethical Hacking: Techniques, Tools, and Countermeasures, 4th Edition

Technology and Social Engineering

As noted earlier, social engineers use many of the same technical tools as other kinds of hackers and cybercriminals. Many threats will continue to pose a problem for users and organizations that increasingly depend on the Internet. Which threats are a factor here? The same ones you know from other cybersecurity contexts: malware, spyware, adware, and viruses, for a start, plus worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, and scareware.

Although many organizations will implement a series of technological, administrative, and physical measures to stop social engineering attacks, security still comes down to individual human users and their training to identify and defeat many of these attacks. The following sections describe ...