Social Engineering and the Art of Influence

Social Engineering (SE) is both incredibly complex and amazingly simple.

What really is social engineering? Social Engineering is defined as the process of deceiving people into giving away access or confidential information. Wikipedia defines it as: "is the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access; in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim."

Due to the mystery surrounding social engineering many people are afraid of it, or they feel they will never be able to accomplish a successful social engineering test. However, every time you try to get someone to do something that is in your interest, you are engaging in social engineering. From children trying to get a toy from their parents to adults trying to land a job or score the big promotion, all of it is a form of social engineering.

One day we started to search for information to develop some training on the topic of Social Engineering as it applies to pentesting. We were astounded to see that the web really lacked a good source of information on this valuable topic. There was a multitude of sources of great technical pentesting info, but social engineering was a different story.

We found plenty of stories about getting free pizza's, tons of stories of famous social engineers and their adventures and more than a few good articles, but not one site that collectively contained, developed and organized this information. Nothing even close to the level of documentation required to treat social engineering like a science.... like an ART.

And like any science, social engineering can be used for different purposes. So whether you are in sales, politics, penetration testing, law enforcement or just want to improve your dealings with others, social engineering is for you.

So gives birth to www.social-engineer.org - a site that will only get better with willing participation from an educated and motivated community. Our site is designed to grow as we grow. We will discuss new and innovative ways to tie social engineering into your skill set. We will continually develop our framework. We hope it will become a standard in social engineering. We encourage you to become a part of this community, give us feed back, submit ideas and your thoughts.

Join us as we document, manipulate, and exploit the HumanOS.

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