The Art of Social Engineering

2

Understanding Social Engineering

In the previous chapter, we learned how criminals leverage some psychological principles to execute successful social engineering attacks. Now, it’s time to understand social engineering attacks in depth by looking at how attackers leverage the popularity of social media to execute some of those attacks at scale, hitting as many victims as possible.

Attackers use a clever combination of social engineering techniques as well as ingenuity to create very interesting attacks that are designed to fool even the most experienced users. This chapter will give you the required skills to easily identify those attacks and understand how you can avoid them.

In a nutshell, the following topics will be discussed:

• Detecting ...