Even with their weaknesses, humans will generally be withdrawn at first about confiding with anyone. It takes skills to be able to break people from their security comfort zones so that they can start spewing out private information. Elicitation is more than building rapport with strangers; it's a technique used in interrogation rooms, used by therapists, and by doctors to get information from people that would otherwise withhold such information. Elicitation, therefore, is the second step in the social engineering framework that is followed during social engineering attacks. The attackers use elicitation techniques after gathering enough information about a target to initialize a conversation.
Elicitation can be defined as the ...
