Making Sense of Cybersecurity

5 Tricking our way in: Social engineering

This chapter covers

• Learning how to spot and challenge potential social engineering
• Spotting and stopping phishing attacks
• Defending against complex attacks
• Using multi-factor authentication to protect against password and ID theft
• Using Operational Security (OPSEC) principles to spot and address security flaws

Social engineering is the psychological manipulation of someone, with the goal of getting them to do what we want. In this chapter, we will explore how attackers use various types of social engineering to plant malware and steal credentials. We’ll also learn how to stop them.

You’ll need to have read chapter 4 to get the most out of this chapter; social engineering builds on the common attacks ...