Social Engineering in IT Security: Tools, Tactics, and Techniques

11	Social Engineering: Past, Present, and Future

The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the same mistakes that they have made in the past.

—Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

As computers continue to become more secure, it is becoming more difficult, in many cases, to bypass security using purely technical means. Because of this more effective security and because users (at least some of them) are becoming more security conscious, social engineering attacks have had to become more sophisticated and more believable to succeed. Gone are the days when users could frequently be taken in by a dodgy-looking email with bad spelling and a glaringly ...