The Art of Hacking Humans: Intro to Social Engineering

A beginner's guide to social engineering and techniques

What you'll learn:

• Define social engineering.
• Give some examples of social engineering techniques.
• Explain social engineers exploit victims.
• Identify common social engineering messages.

We are constantly exposed to various threats regarding our information in this day-and-age. We are becoming more and more connected to networks like the Internet with a lot of our daily activities - both and work and play - revolve around a digital device or platform or the other; this increases our vulnerability to compromise by malicious attackers. A very common method used by malicious attackers to compromise information and information systems is social engineering. This takes advantage of human weakness to initiate or execute an attack or breach.

This course seeks to give a basic overview of social engineering to the beginner. It introduces the concept of social engineering and some common social engineering techniques, and how these techniques can be used to manipulate victims resulting in compromise.

Note: Although email addresses are generally redacted in sample social engineering messages shown in the course, bear in mind that any email address and names of apparent senders of such messages contained herein might be hacked. That is to say the names and email addresses that appear might belong to innocent people, but might have been hijacked.