Unmasking the Social Engineer: The Human Element of Security

Chapter 1

What Is Nonverbal Communication?

Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.

—Irene Claremont de Castillejo

My first book, Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking, touched on the subject of communication modeling. I talked about how important it is to develop and understand the model around which you and others communicate.

Communication modeling is understanding the methods used to give and receive information. For instance, if you are communicating through email the sender (you) has to transmit emotion, intention, and message using only words, emoticons, and phrasing. The receiver (recipient) has to decipher this based on their state of mind and the way they interpret your email. In the communications cycle, feedback, in its varied forms, is critical.

If you are communicating in person, on the other hand, the sender has not only the words spoken but the body language, facial expressions, and more to relay the message. This means that a social engineer needs to model their communication style, method, and content based on the manner of communication as well as the receiver.

This chapter focuses on nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is a rich and complex topic, so this chapter first identifies what nonverbal communication is before breaking it down into smaller subsets.

To understand nonverbal communication, you must also understand what each one of our senses adds to the way we communicate. That is the crux of ...