The Art of Social Engineering

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The Psychology behind Social Engineering

You have probably heard the term social engineering before, either in the news (as part of a big scam) or even in your job as part of the annual security awareness program.

But what is social engineering? Well, to make it simple, we can just say that social engineering is the art of manipulating people to perform an action that will provide a benefit for the attacker. That action could be in the form of disclosing information, executing an action (such as executing a command), or even disabling or bypassing a security measure.

In other words, social engineering is focused on “hacking” the users, not the systems.

Now, to better understand social engineering, it is imperative to understand the psychology, ...