Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

Methodology and attack methods

As an attack route supporting the kill chain methodology, social engineering focuses on the different aspects of an attack that take advantage of a person's trust and innate helpfulness to deceive and manipulate them into compromising a network and its resources. The following diagram depicts the different types of attack methods that attackers can engage in to harvest information:

From the last edition, we have now reclassified social engineering tactics into two main categories: one that involves technology and another that includes people-specific techniques.

The following sections will provide a briefing ...